How to avoid a newsletter addiction

3 easy steps to get rid of the noise

I. 📋

You might be reading too many newsletters. The highways of your cyberspace are filled with noise.

You’re addicted, not in the way that you’re addicted to alcohol & betting your life’s savings on the next meme coin, but addicted in the sense that you don’t even know that you’re addicted.

And it's very easy to just deny this and say that you're not, that you're fine and reading dozens or even hundreds of newsletters is actually helping you. That it doesn’t matter how many emails clog up your inbox.

There is some truth to that statement.

In the TikTok, Reels & YouTube Shorts era where cheap dopamine is always a few flicks of the thumb away & everyone seems to make that addiction perfectly societally acceptable, your newsletter consumption shouldn't even be questioned.

Is it not exponentially better that you're reading writers on Substack, thinkers with ideas, rather than watching dozens of uncreative influencers lip-sync and dance to garbage songs?

It is!

Scrolling through 30-second videos which are algorithmically engineered to cause dissatisfaction, just enough dissatisfaction, for you to want to scroll to the next video - is equivalent to an addict shooting drugs where once in a while - the addict doesn’t get the “hit” causing them to crave the drug harder.

By that standard, Substack is an intellectual paradise. It’s equivalent to keeping your door open and watching interesting people regularly come to your room and just start talking.

But then again, if there are too many people doing this, all you’ll hear is noise.

So, if you've ever felt like you're spending just a little too much time on newsletters, that all the weekly newsletters you subscribe to has ended up filling your inbox on a daily basis with 20 new emails that you now have to go through in the hopes that you'll find something interesting, something intellectually stimulating, or even discover some new writer who also writes a weekly newsletter, then you're probably reading too many newsletters.

I know for certain that some of you are really reading too many newsletters. Whenever anyone with a substack account subscribes to bright mirror, I get to see what else they read and whenever it's something like "Reads X & 163 other substacks" - a part of me dies a little.

Even if half of those newsletters are weekly newsletters & at a 1000 words each, that's 80k words to read through.

That’s full length novels of just…. news?

Even skimming though 80k words a week sounds like a nightmare especially if a majority of those words aren’t adding value, but giving you the impression that they “might”.

For other platforms, this isn't much of a problem.

For example - on YouTube, they stop showing you videos from channels that you're no longer interested in & keep showing you videos from channels that you regularly watch videos of.

Substack, as amazing of a platform as it is, gives you the power to choose.

And for emails, it's not so simple, as you do have to click & open each of them to read & check each and everyone of them out. You can't let them remain unread based on their titles alone since it's almost impossible to say what the contents of a newsletter are, based on just the title that the author decided to choose.

So, what do you do?

The answer is simple.

II. ❌

Unsubscribe.

But based on what?

This essay is about the rules I follow, rules that I had to begrudgingly create to avoid drowning in useless information, and this might even work for other aspects of your life like who you follow on socials, which channels you subscribe to on YouTube, etc.

A good way to do this is to just ignore all the emails you receive over a week so that it all piles up, and then make your way through each of them while asking yourself the following question -

1. Am I learning anything new from this? Did I learn anything new from this recently?

I've often found myself subscribing to people that I learnt something useful in the past, but beyond that one thing, all they've sent me are marketing emails & useless surveys. Unsubscribe!

2. Is this something that is relevant or useful to me right now? Is this adding any value to my life?

It can happen that you subscribed to a newsletter hoping they'd aggregate something or curate news based on a specific field, one that you're no longer interested in. It’s time to unsubscribe.

3. Is this interesting? Does this author regularly say something interesting? When was the last time they wrote something interesting?

It may happen that you subscribed to an author based on something really insightful they wrote - only to realize that the insight came after weeks of planning & their current cadence of weekly publishing hasn’t produced anything insightful in the last year.

Regularly saying interesting things is hard. But the best authors who write interesting things are irregular. They obsess over quality of thought over quantity of noise. So, this shouldn't be a hard decision.

III. 🚀

The hard thing about doing this is that there's always that feeling that you'll miss out on something important.

Many prominent people suggest not reading any books published in the last 10 years - because usually, new books don't stand the test of time. Most new books repeat old ideas, and while reading about the same ideas in subtle & different ways can help you properly absorb & remember each idea, most don’t add any value if you’re decently well read.

But I don't agree with the first part of the above theory, or else I wouldn't read any newsletters or write one.

I believe that good ideas can show up at any moment in time. What you read tomorrow can be more important than something written 100 years ago that people still read. Which means that it's impossible that there's no one writing right now who wouldn't be read and religiously studied 1000 years later.

So, there's always a trade off as you choose to unsubscribe from the writers that flood your inbox today with weekly updates of their lives or the ideas that they're contemplating.

How big is that trade off?

Not quite big.

Usually, the best writing bubble out of substack's ecosystem, end up on sites like Hackernews, Reddit or X, and sooner or later, if some piece of writing is absolutely important enough - you'll read it.

It's highly unlikely that you'll miss a really great thing that isn’t popular. The only exception here is that if you unsubscribe to that new writer who is just not famous enough yet, but regularly shares valuable insights, then you should keep subscribing to them. There could also be writers that only curate links, but high quality links which are worth reading, but even those are better as RSS feeds than clogging up your inbox.

Either way, I hope this essay helps you unsubscribe from the writers that don't add any value & keep your inbox cleaner.

There are two ways to be happy - by addition or by subtraction. By addition, you have chosen to subscribe to writers, followed people & podcasts & channels, but it is by subtraction that you’ll get to enjoy & absorb what you added more fully.

Unfollow the accounts that don't add any value to you. Block accounts & mute words on X that you don't want to see again.

If you’ve never done this, this will not only free up your time like never before, but the positive effects will serve as a reminder to repeat this process every few months from now on.

Cultivate a life of intentionality.

If the highways of your cyberspace are too noisy today, you still have the power to choose to rise up and ignore all the noise.