“A person is an appetite”, I read over the weekend, and I’ve been turning it over since.
Not just an appetite in the sense of wanting, but in the sense of taking in. Of choosing, absorbing, becoming. Just like our body digests food and uses it as fuel, what we crave, what we desire, is digested into who we are. Maybe we’re less defined by what we are, and more by what we let shape us, what we reach for, what we give our attention to, again and again, until it starts to feel like us.
So maybe, a person really is an appetite. But more than that, a person is the shape that appetite carves out over time, the sum of what they’ve taken in, and the particular way it has learned to hunger.
To stretch the metaphor a little further, we already understand “diet” in a broader sense than just weight loss. It’s simply what we regularly consume. A grown adult living on chicken nuggets and fries raises an eyebrow, there’s something stunted about it, something unrefined. Someone who avoids animal products becomes legible to us as vegan or vegetarian. Their diet tells a story about them.
But what about the rest of what we consume?
Our cultural diet. Our social diet. The things we watch, listen to, read, and repeat. Isn’t that the diet that says most?
It’s easy to dismiss entertainment and information as harmless background noise, something to fill the silence. But over time, it doesn’t stay in the background. It seeps forward. It shapes us, just as much as our lived experiences do, if not more. Which makes the question feel larger than it first appears: what are you feeding your mind?
For much of history, even the act of learning carried weight. When women pursued education, it wasn’t seen as neutral, it was rebellious, even dangerous. The desire to consume knowledge itself was treated as disobedience, a refusal to accept the limits imposed on them.
And culture carries its own appetite. Take techno, not just music, but a response, born out of industrial decline and systemic discrimination, shaped by resistance to commercialization and control. To participate in that scene wasn’t just to listen, it was to absorb a set of values, to share in a mood, a stance, a way of seeing the world.
Even on a smaller scale, the pattern holds. If you watch a sad movie a day, your attitude is bound to differ from someone who watches a comedy every day.
And it goes beyond art or media. If we constantly crave gossip, we don’t just hear it, we become shaped by it. A little more questionable. A little less trusting. Appetite becomes character, almost without asking.
What you give your attention to becomes your diet of the mind, of the self.
So the question lingers: what exactly are you feeding it?
