What Are You Eating?

Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.

Deep Work, Cal Newport*

“You are what you eat.”

That’s a weird saying. It’s common, but that doesn’t make it any less strange. After all, I eat a lot of different things, and I have yet to turn into a variety of food. But, that’s not the point of the saying, is it? Of course not.

The point is that if we want to live a healthy lifestyle, then it begins with our diet. Another thing you’ve probably heard is that you can’t out exercise a poor diet. And, it’s true. No matter how much we exercise, if we eat complete junk, then we are going to struggle with our overall health.

But… I’m not here to give you health advice today. Instead, I want to focus on what this has to do with our intellectual (and spiritual) life.

How we see the world is our worldview. We all have one – whether or not we realize it, and whether or not we acknowledge it. We all see the world through a particular lens. This colors how we approach issues.

The most obvious place we see it is when it comes to our political outlook. People are so blindly connected to their political point of view that it colors how they see major issues that face our country. It affects how they see the world, and how they approach others.

Unfortunately, as our society has become more and more polarized along the political spectrum, we have created a lot of silos and echo chambers that prevent us from being able to listen to the other side. We are only feeding our brain very biased information, and the end result is stronger polarization along the political spectrum.

I think the most obvious place we see this right now is the news of Montana’s Republican primary results which saw Liz Cheney lose to her challenger. Cheney has been a very strong voice against the former president, who has proceeded to do everything possible, alongside those who also are in his orbit, to make sure that she gets ousted from office. They finally succeeded.

In all other things, Cheney is a Republican. In the votes that have been party-line, she is voting with all the other Republicans. She just (rightly) identifies that Trump is a danger to democracy as a whole, and wants nothing to do with him in particular.

Of course, for those who are on the Trump Train, she’s a RINO (Republican In Name Only), and they are celebrating her primary loss today. These are people who only watch and feed themselves the extreme right point of view.

And this is why what we feed our brains is so important.

Look, not every point of view is worth considering. There’s a lot of talk about how the education system needs to teach “both sides” of historical issues. The bottom line is, I don’t want to understand the Holocaust from a Nazi point of view. It was evil. Period. If we are going to study something like that it needs to be biased against it so that such atrocities never happen again, and the ideology that caused it to happen gets banished from the planet.

However, there are legitimate times when we do need to understand both sides. We need to understand where people are coming from. We need to understand why people think what they think, especially if they think differently than we do. When we do this, we create a broader worldview that will only help us out in the long term, and this worldview is shaped by what we allow to enter into our mental space.

So, be intentional about this. Pay attention to a diversity of thought that will help you get a broader perspective on what’s going on in the world. You are what you eat, so feed your brain well.

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