There's too much of everything. Over the last 20 years everyone rushed to get everything onto the internet, so it's noisy, messy and can be overwhelming if you aren't careful. Personally, I like to subscribe to Netflix for 30 days a year, catch up on stuff, and then cancel my subscription. Same for Amazon Prime, HBO Max and Disney+. I feel lucky that I never got used to Spotify, because it means I save $11/mo that I can use to buy CDs from artists I know I like (and YouTube/KEXP/KCRW is far better at surfacing excellent music anyway). So I end up with CDs in the car, and listening to Youtube at home. It works. As for TV shows, most of them suck anyway.

I blacklist websites that I feel are bad for me using /etc/hosts, but I still consume too much news. I was thinking about this today and how to alleviate it without hiding my head in the sand. Honestly a weekly news magazine like The Economist would probably be enough.

Ideally I'd have a tool that lets me react once to a given news item and then track it over time, filtering out repetitive or meta news (especially news about other people's reactions to the news), show me only substantive changes over time, and ideally with a weight that (geometrically) increases with proximity. What is humbling is to realize how easily led we are, how things that seem so important, so vital, end up just...forgotten when the news dies down. It's actually quite scary when you think about it, almost as if your reactions to things aren't quite your own! This tool would help recover that control.