Want to be a funny guy? Consume a lot of funny shit. That’s the advice MrBeast gives for making great content. The funniest guy he knows – funny as fuck – watches an ‘obscene amount of cartoons and stupid shit.’ His eyeballs have one purpose: ‘to inhail [sic] copious amounts of just goofy, dumb, and brain numbing content.’ MrBeast recommends you ruthlessly curate your information diet to succeed. In his case, MrBeast spend years ingesting the Youtube audience metric data to understand what reliably goes viral: now look at his subscribers.

Want to be an interesting guy? Same story. Nabeel S. Qureshi recommends curating your twitter feed because ‘a well-curated Twitter feed is worth a lot of IQ points.’ Or, from a slightly different angle, Gwern’s approach is to continually read studies and papers in an endless hunt for the surprising. Here is what he says about the risks of focusing one’s efforts on writing a book:

Information is the food-input and your communication is the movement-output; processing happens via thought and cognition. If you want to evolve as a thinker then you need a fast metabolism and plenty of input: you must consume a lot of good content. The effective thinker curates their information diet as carefully as they curate their culinary: whether brainrot or junk food, garbage in means garbage out.

I call this the Human Processor model of cognition. It is only natural in the 21st century: being integrated into cybernetic systems makes you think more like a computer chip. Maybe you also feel this way: do you ‘process’ thoughts? Are many of your ideas and phrases ‘cached’? How optimised are you? Many of the modern popular degeneracies evoke the feeling of this uncontrolled optimisation: looksmaxxing, gooning, mukbanging. They reveal how warped humans can become when the media optimisation mindset is taken to its logical conclusion. How many tweets are you away from Androgenic?

The feeling that people are frighteningly transformed by mass-produced media is not a new one, although it has been schizophrenically intensified. In 1925 Churchill described the interwar equivalent of social media slop. Fed on a diet of ‘light reading’, newspapers, and cheap paperbacks, the Englishman was becoming a standardised product:

Churchill rejected this process and preferred a world which retained its ‘frowning crag, [its] venerated El Capitan or Il Duce, casting its majestic shadow in the evening light.” He longs for a middle-way of industrial progress and the lone romantic genius, embodied most dramatically in Mussolini’s Italy. Churchill thus introduces the greatest enemy of the Human Processor: romanticism.

Every iota of Western consciousness has been touched by this philosophy. We owe to romanticism the freedom of the artist and the popular scepticism of mechanistic models of the human; the belief our values are many and necessarily incompatible; and the admission that all human answers and plans are imperfect. Most modern people regard romanticism as a quality of novels, maybe a school of poets – certainly not a worldview capable of resisting the Human Processor. Isaiah Berlin had other ideas: for him, romanticism was:

The madness of romanticism has a power of its own. The romantic laughs at the man of many inputs. Didn’t you hear? Reading blogs and skimming classics won’t make you special. No amount of information intake is going to turn you into David Lynch, or a painter like Goya, or a poet like Robert Burns. There is something endogenous in these artists giving them vast generative power beyond the ordinary.

Consider Shakespeare. Anyone who has read a Shakespeare play will immediately sense the absurd profusion of his world. It cannot be explained away by suggesting he read widely or even had a varied life. You feel he was a man of infinite capacity and creation, brimming with men, creatures, villains, ghosts, and gods. JL Borges described him in Everything and Nothing as a man who, like the Egyptian Proteus, “used up the forms of all creatures.”

Romanticism calls this special quality depth. We might say that David Lewis is a superior philosopher to Nietzsche, but it is impossible to regard him as a deeper one. A work with depth always leaves something unexpressed and some threads trailing; it always has more things to say and new meanings to be revealed. In Italo Calvino’s terms, “a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” It has overtones of abundance, plenitude, generosity, and wildness. A deep book is endlessly rewarding.

The romantic’s reading habits are fundamentally opposed to the Human Processor’s. Nietzsche, undoubtedly a man containing deep romantic urges, regarded over-reading as enervating and pathetic. In the section ‘Why I am so clever” in Ecce Homo, he scorned the man of many studies:

Instead of ‘maximising input’, or curating a steady flow of information, Nietzsche read the same few books over and over again his entire life. He was disgusted by all books except those which attracted him: “a library makes me ill, neither is it my nature to love much or many kinds of things.” His own writing was supposed to repulse the unworthy: only a select few could access his work and discover the vast hidden depths. Everything else – newspapers, pamphlets, articles – is chaff.

It takes insane confidence to adopt a romantic reading diet. Essentially, you have to gamble. You have to hope that you find the right classics with which to expend your time. If you choose wrongly then you might forfeit the possibility of becoming a genius. But this requires more than spirit; you must have the good fortune to be born in the right time. Nietzsche himself counted his blessings that he was in his own generation, for his predecessors had all been “corrupted by German philosophy.” Today, no Nietzsche could exist; he would be crushed by circumstance.

The difference between the Human Processor and the Romantic ultimately divides along the explore-exploit algorithm. If you believe raw information – summarised, condensed, distilled – is what matters, that Thus Spake Zarathustra or On the Genealogy of Morality would have been better as long blog posts, then you will spend more time exploring. Optionality is key and rapid flitting provides a powerful competitive edge. Every new study is another piece of straw in your grand pile. Your throughput will burn away the opposition.

Conversely, if you believe there are hidden depths to certain works which require dedicated study to receive, then you will spend far more time exploiting. You trust that the text of Hamlet or Gracián’s Art of Worldly Wisdom retains powerful and unknown meanings; solid truths upon which vast edifices of new values, new sensations, and new ideas can be built to meet new conditions. You know there is something about these writers – experience beyond experience, genius beyond genius – which exists with them alone.

Anyone can be a human microchip if they want to be. They might be a bit slower than average, but they’ll still be running code. Romanticism, in contrast, is cruel. Whatever you might tell yourself at night, only a few people seem to possess artistic genius, and fewer still are born in the right conditions. It is cultural and genetic, a game of tails; there is no reason to think a clone of Shakespeare today would produce his great works. By exploiting a limited canon obsessively you risk wasting your life.

Can you take that risk? Not the risk of temporary failure, the risk of spending your entire life on the wrong books. Few people are capable of facing this fear. By choosing and firmly committing to the classics, you take your life in your hands. The choice is yours.