What's Scarce
TL;DR: You probably don't need to spend another 30 minutes reading or checking Twitter. The same way you probably don't need to have another helping of food. You simply want to, because your brain is wired to crave information/social connection/calories. You're going to do all of this anyway. So it's probably worth it to spend at least some time doing the opposite - that which is scarce.
the marginal utility of spending the next 30 minutes reading or doing something else is much smaller than sitting in front of a blank page for 30 minutes and trying to write
This is intuitive, but worth exploring why it is the case. The load-bearing concept here is "marginal utility".
I truly believe that spending zero time on Twitter, or Hackernews, or some other forum where I keep up-to-date on technology and ideas would be a net negative. I don't think it would be a huge net-negative, but I think it would be a small difference. I learn about many interesting things by reading Twitter.
One concrete example is my re-exposure to AI. I had not been on Twitter for some time before ~2022. But one day I found myself back on it, and saw news about ChatGPT. It was obviously still early - much earlier than someone coming in today or last year would be. But for someone who used to be obsessed with AI and following most of the top researchers already, this was really late.
Another example is vibe coding / Cursor. I learned about Cursor pretty early, and tried it pretty early as well. I wrote it off during those early days because it was kind of cool, but still mostly slowed me down. But eventually I saw more and more noise about it, and had to check it out.
This led to me trying to push more and more engineers at my old startup to to use it. And the impact of this is that we moved faster, which is quite important for a young startup trying to find PMF.
So hopefully I have convinced you that there is value to being on Twitter. In fact this generalizes to pretty much anything consumptive. Books, music, the news, etc. No one would say that you should go back to a time before the printing press, before radios and Spotify, or before the newspaper. All of these were transformative technologies and have improved the world.
And the reason they were so impactful? Because they made something accessible, at a period in history where that something was scarce. I don't get the sense that many people in the 1500s for example had access to books. Now we have the Library of Alexandria at our fingernails. Listening to music used to be reserved for the noble and the rich. Now we are the private audience to an orchestra in our own living room.
But there's only so much music you can listen to, and only so many books you can read before you start to need something else. To go for a walk, to write, to meet some friends at a park. I think we all know this as well. We want to write more or see our friends more. But because of increased abundance of content and entertainment in society, opportunities for the former feel scarce.
Again, this is not a moral judgement, or a critique of progress. It's simply acknowledging that we live in a world with an abundance, but maybe we have not adapted to it. Similar parallels between entertainment/social media can be made with food. We not just have an abundance of caloric density in our food environment, but also a staggering variety. It would seem impossible and, once again, seem to be a luxury only for the rich that I can eat mandarin oranges in the middle of winter in Québec. Our brains were not ready for the abundance of food - we were wired to try and accumulate calories for fear of later not having enough. This is a fear that is unlikely to materialize in the West.
Put another way, our brains were wired to believe that the marginal utility of calories were high. Because calories truly were scarce. But that's no longer true, and we need to adapt. Today, the marginal utility of restraint might be slightly higher.
Similar to news/entertainment/social media/consumption. These are all things that would be categorized under "leisure", in the past. Something only reserved for the rich. But today, almost everyone rich or poor has access to a smartphone. The marginal utility of creation, [noticing]([[2025-07-19 1556 noticing as a muscle]]), and real interaction might be higher.
So what's the solution? It might be bad advice to tell you to get off all social media, stop watching the news, and stop reading. The same way it would be bad to tell you to stop eating all junk food. In the case of junk food, I believe there is some research that suggests that this can create disordered eating.
I think the best thing we can do is try and take as many opportunities as we can to do that which is scarce. That which is scarce has a higher marginal utility - you stand to benefit more than by spending the same resources on something that is abundant. After all, you're going to continue participating in everything that is abundant. You probably don't need more.