Owais Awan, Art Director at We Are SocialWe have access to more inspiration and references than any other generation in all of history… so why do we still suffer from creative blocks and a lack of ideas? A little ironic, considering how many we’re bombarded with every day. But what if a part of the problem was the abundance?
To break this down, perhaps the fix is hidden inside medieval agriculture and the food industry (bear with me).
Tell me if you identify with any of the following…
- Constant anxiety or anger from the news
- Feeling informed but unable to explain anything deeply
- Compulsive phone checking
- Decreasing attention span
Does that sound about right? The good news is, it probably applies to everyone you know. And while there’s no single categorical bucket to blame for this, food may be an angle worth exploring.
There are a staggering amount of parallels between food and the information we consume. We even call it consuming.
Evolutionary mismatch
For the longest time in history, we didn’t really have a whole lot of food. As a matter of fact; scarcity was a certainty. Having an abundance of food is a very, very new problem we aren’t evolutionarily equipped to handle.
Famine didn’t just used to be more common; it was pretty much guaranteed. So much so that medieval peasants structured life around “the hungry gap“. Hunger was a season. Being full was considered morally suspect. Fast forward today and you can conjure 3,000 calories at your doorstep faster than your ancestors could boil water.
Now, consider Information.
For most of history, information was scarce. Books were rare. Ideas moved at a glacial pace. If you wanted inspiration, you had to travel for it, apprentice for it, earn it. Reading wasn’t even a skill, it was a privilege and a luxury.
Now, inspiration arrives pre-packaged and algorithmically optimised. The collective recorded knowledge of humans throughout history fits in your pocket.
You wake up and have consumed design references, think pieces, AI demos, a breakdown of the latest case study, client emails, world news, hot takes, trend predictions, memes, messages, announcements, and someone’s confident LinkedIn post about why branding is dead.
All before lunch.
This is the information equivalent of drinking water from a firehose. For a brain built for scarcity, we gave it infinity and are now surprised it’s malfunctioning.
The parallels go on and on.And if there’s a way to eat healthy, then there ought to be a way to consume information healthily too. While the food pyramid was straight up propaganda; it acknowledged something essential: quantity and proportion matter. Maybe information could benefit from a similar framework?
Mental macronutrients
Whole knowledge
Books, primary sources, lived experience, long conversations. While they might not taste the best, they’re high in nutrients and build long-term cognition. Too much of this alone and you risk a dogmatic and narrow mind.
Breadth
Curated newsletters, smart feeds, well-built explainers.Keeps your intellectual microbiome diverse and prevents that echo-chamber constipation mentioned previously. Too much of this and you create the illusion of knowledge, but seldom does anything actually stick.
Stimulation
Video essays, AI summaries, short-form content. Fun! Sparks curiosity and lowers friction to exploration. But too much trains impatience and weakens memory and reasoning.
You aren’t well-read; you’re just intellectually obese
Now, here’s one for you: Explain the last “big idea” you encountered at least 3 days ago that you can rearticulate now.
See, even if you consumed all the right things, in the right order, it wouldn’t matter unless you can recall and synthesise it when needed. It’s like eating without exercise.
When production becomes accessible to everyone, production stops being the advantage. What’ll remain scarce is clarity. The job won’t be more output; it will be causing less confusion.
“It’s the designer who knows what to reject, not just what to create. It’s the strategist who recognises the single line of truth in a mess of generated noise and hallucination. It’s the writer who can turn a bland model output into a line that brings a smile to the mind.” – Cat How
Cool… but how do we build for that? What does a healthy information diet consist of?
The information fast
Shop intentionally
Decide what you’ll consume before you open the feed. Curate your inputs. Build reading lists. Follow people for depth, not volume. Meal prep for your mind.
Chew slowly
After reading something interesting, pause to summarise or restate it before moving on. Sketch it. Argue with it. Daydream with it. Hundreds of studies since the 1970s confirm: deeper processing creates stronger memories.
Don’t snack constantly
Create fasting windows for your brain. Eg: No passive scrolling before noon. Protect your first creative hour or so to avoid intellectual obesity and or burnout. The brain needs consolidation time. Constant input prevents information from moving into long-term memory.
Eat the rainbow
Expose yourself to diverse disciplines. Read outside advertising. Study biology, architecture, philosophy, and mechanics. Prevent malnutrition and protect your intellectual microbiome.
Digest
Write. Publish. Present. Teach. Build prototypes. The act of output is what turns knowledge into craft.
“The tragedy of the intelligent man who never creates anything is that he dies an expert on other people’s lives” – Jo Johnson
The metrics of meaning
If we’re going to have a diet, we need some way to measure progress:
Clarity
You should be able to restate an idea in your own words without leaning on jargon, quotes, or the original source. If it falls apart when you try to simplify it—it didn’t fully stick yet.
Novelty
A healthy information diet produces new connections. Ideas should start colliding with older ideas. If everything you consume sits in isolation; you’re not building insight, you’re just stacking input. Novel thinking is usually just old pieces recombined.
Retention
If most of what you consume feels unfamiliar three days later, you’re overconsuming. Depth leaves a mark. The things that matter should linger, reshaping how you see other things.
The art of rejection
There’s a funny irony in our industry. We pride ourselves on originality while swimming in the sameness of the most optimised copying machine in human history. We fear and dread creative blocks, but never consider creative obesity. Abundance in of itself isn’t the enemy. We truly are privileged and lucky in that regard. Unexamined consumption, however, is.
And in an age obsessed with more, the rarest skill in the room is still the same: To take the noise and carve it down to one clear line.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is not a blanket solution to all creative blocks or overwhelm. It’s one lens for one kind of them. It’s an experiment in applied metaphor, double checked by academic literature.
Some jobs require constant scanning. Some minds thrive in abundance. Some people just don’t have the privilege of curating their intake.
This framework has been fine tuned to work best for people with creative or strategic roles who feel overwhelmed by discretionary information consumption. The endless scroll, the compulsive tab-opening, the guilt of an unread reading list. It’s less applicable if your work requires constant environmental scanning (journalism, trend forecasting, research), or if your schedule doesn’t allow for protected focus time. Take what’s useful and works for you. Forget the rest.
By Owais Awan, Art Director at We Are Social
