Asaro vs asaro and the evolution of consumption
Why you should commit to a life of reading (learning) and writing (producing).
Hi guys,
Hope you are well. I’m doing okay, Alhamdulillah.
I write this at 9:40 am on a Sunday morning, lying on the floor. Technically on a mat, but you get the point. I’m tired. Yesterday was not a stressful day in all honesty, but I feel a bit drained all the same. And I can already foresee a day of physical (and perhaps emotional) exertion. It is what it is.
Update: I am finalizing writing this at 10:44 pm on Sunday evening. My premonition was right, it was a day of physical and emotional exertion. I am tayadd, but glad the day went well. Since I no longer have the energy to write a newsletter tonight, I am sharing a newsletter I wrote over 6 months ago but which never left my drafts.
I had previously written about 85% of it already when I decided that I did not like the flow and it was unworthy of being published. Tonight, I am sharing it anyway.
Vamosss.
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I think active reading x writing are some of the most important commitments a young person can make to personal development. My head is scattered and I’m building off the ideas of someone I do not remember, so bear with me. But the basic idea is this.
We are perhaps the first generation to live in a minimum investment, maximum consumption world.
What do I mean?
** side note: Rather than do research on the actual evolution of these ideas, I will do the lazy thing instead and assume my guesses on historical data are correct. Okay? Okay.
Let’s start with food.
For thousands of years, our forefathers who needed to eat had to work first. They had to catch prey, slaughter it, then cook it before actually enjoying the meal. And they had to do this every single time. Let’s call it deferred consumption. Work, then eat.
As time went on, things became a little easier.
In the last few centuries, cooling technology gained ground. You no longer needed to catch a meal and cook every single time. You could prepare a meal and then store it for future use. So maybe you could work (cook) for every two or three meals.
Much easier.
Also, the concept of eating out became more prominent as well. You didn’t even need to only eat food you cooked and stored. Restaurants became more abundant as humanity became more prosperous. But there was a catch. You needed to put in a bit of effort to consume.
Maybe you took a 5-minute walk to the nearest Asaro place.
** side note: I initially wrote ‘asaro’, but my computer corrected me that it is actually ‘Asaro’. For such an elite meal, I do agree that the first letter is indeed deserving of capitalization. As to how my computer knows such words, more investigation is required. Carry on plix. 😅
Maybe our parents drove 30 minutes to find a good Mr. Biggs in the good old days. They would have had to wear clothes, brave traffic, stand in line, and bear many external factors just to purchase a nice meal.
So there was still some level of effort invested into the consumption process.
Today, things have changed for the better. If you need to eat (consume) and don’t want to cook (work), it is so much easier. Fast-food chains are much more abundant than they were just a few decades ago.
And we really don’t need to put any effort. With Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Grab, Just Eat, and Jumia Food (depending on where you are in the world), you can have a meal delivered to your doorstep in minutes.

And it doesn’t matter what your cravings are, somebody somewhere is making them available over the internet. Beans and dodo? Jollof rice? Chinese food? Pizza? Pepper soup? Small chops?
We have more meal choices than our great-grandparents could have imagined.
So, back to the main idea. Minimum-investment, maximum-consumption world. To show you that it’s not just about food, let’s think about entertainment.
If we lived in say, 200 BC and wanted to unwind, there were a couple of options. If we were Greek princes in a palace somewhere, we could request some beautiful young damsels to sing for us.
If we were not rich princes and or did not fancy being sung to, we could engage in a wrestling match in the village square. Or we might have gone on a hunting expedition to a nearby forest. Or archery. Or horse racing. Or something else.
Do you know what all these have in common?
You guessed it, they required a lot of work.
If you are as lazy as I am, then the thought of entering a wrestling contest as a means of unwinding is an unimaginable concept. The mere fact that I was not born in an era of young men being sent off to battles is a huge cause for Alhamdulillah. 😅
But as time went on, the means of relaxation and entertainment became more accessible. The emergence of television for example. But some effort was still required. If it were in the 1900s, tuning in required some work. You might have needed to constantly fiddle with the antenna to keep the video quality of your TV set clear.
Other examples would be wounding the cassette, carrying a radio around on your shoulder, or transporting yourself to a cinema or play. Consumption was on the rise, but effort/investment was very much present.
This brings us to today. Very much like in the food story above, with the availability of YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, IrokoTV, etc, we can consume much more content than previous generations could imagine. And we can access them right away with minimum effort.
But you know all these things already. Why am I talking about them?
Do you remember what I started this newsletter with?
‘I think active reading x writing are some of the most important commitments a young person can make to personal development.’ - me, 5 minutes ago
** side note: My usage of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ here are both literal and metaphorical. On one hand, reading and writing are things I am biased to anyway, and think more people should give them a try. On the other hand, you might struggle with reading books or putting words together. Similar activities as 'reading’ would be watching documentaries and listening to podcasts, while equivalents of 'writing’ would include creating artwork and writing code. Basically just ‘learning’ and ‘producing'.
Yes, that. As we live in a consumption-heavy world, I realized something was very important.
In a world of abundant consumption, you need to control what goes into your mind
Most of us have at least one memory we wish we could delete from our existence.
‘I really wish I could take those words back.’
‘I would never have had anxiety issues if I never met Shade.’
‘I shouldn’t have made that joke back in 2014. It was a really bad thing to say.’
We remember some things we did at one point and cringe, wishing they never happened. But those thoughts, feelings, and memories will never go away. They will continue to pop up at random moments in your life and influence your thought processes going forward.
You know why?
Because your mind registered them already. They are a part of you, like it or not.
The same analogy can be made for what we consume. Every movie, book, podcast, TV show, song, tweet, reel, or whatever else you consume registers itself somewhere in your mind and becomes a part of your subconscious going forward.
And in a world where the content to be consumed is abundant, only you can make the decision to filter what comes into your headspace. And this brings me back to reading books. One of the key advantages of reading books/articles (as opposed to many other means of content consumption like Facebook posts) is that the writer puts in a lot of effort.
Reading this post might take you several minutes. But writing it takes me several hours. That bar - several hours of work - ensures that to some extent the content you consume from reading is well-intentioned and well-reasoned. Of course, there are a lot of people who still have bad intentions and or write unreasonable things.
I see it like keeping a guard x bouncer outside a nightclub. Anybody that comes in must have crossed a hurdle (such as dressing very nice, knowing someone inside and being on the guest list, or tipping the guard). Yes, some rascals will find their way in any way, but there is a much higher degree of ‘protection’ compared to a nightclub without a bouncer.
Similarly, increasing the share of your mind’s consumption that comes from reading (remember the last side note about ‘reading’ = watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, etc) overall leads to a higher quality mind consumption and an ‘improved’ subconscious or thought process going forward.
As you slowly wrap up 2021 and prepare for a new year, I hope you make a personal commitment to increase your time allocation to 'learning' and 'producing'.
Your future self will thank you for it.
** Jara content:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
- George Bernard Shaw
Have a great week. ✨
Great job, Hameed ✨
First of all, these computers are really starting to scare me too 😂
I like the fact that you used "learning and producing" because some people feel left out when people talk about the importance of "reading and writing", not me though love'em
Also yes it is very important to filter what we consume in this generation 😩 because it's the bad things that seem to stick to the mind so well. Here's to more active reading and writing 🥂 (don't worry it's juice that's inside 😄).
The jara content 🔥
That Jara content hit well