[scryder]

>I don't think of a reading TODO as "food" such that you should eat the old food before the new food. (The old food will expire so it makes sense to consume that first.)

Based on this explanation, maybe you should. News and information often decrease in usefulness and relevance the longer you wait to digest it.

[hueving]

Any information that decreases in usefulness very quickly with time wasn't very useful to begin with. If anything, your argument supports the idea of letting things sit in a queue for months to determine if it's still relevant before bothering to consume it to begin with.

[scryder]

This logic is wrongheaded, as it ignores the context which causes information to expire:

>Socially:

I'll expand this one the most, because a similar argumentative line will apply to all the other ones.

Current events stories are a common point of discussion, and current stories become less relevant over time.

For example, discussion about politics at this moment, during last October, and during this January, are marked by such flux in notable talking points that if you were reading articles from each time period during the others, you will not be meaningfully contributing to any individual political discourse.

This is true in discourse about some (or many) other fields, including tech, sports, and all modern forms of mass media, including film, television, and literature.

People who sit waiting for others to collate their media decisions for them while things wait in the queue for months will only be citing and capable of discussing settled true-isms, which is far more useless and uninteresting for discussion than being right or wrong. This is socially bad for you, and sociability, for better or worse, strongly correlates with your life satisfaction and income. In some sense, you're implicitly arguing happiness and money aren't useful or important.

>Relationship-wise:

The difference between wishing a friend a "Happy Birthday" on their birthday and a month later is in the latter case most people would recommend not bringing it up, as you waited too long. Relationships matter to most people, so shelf life on dealing with available relationship info is time sensitive

>Economically:

The moment you as a general person are aware of a major economic trend is, roughly speaking, the moment when the best parts of it have already been scraped over and most of the remainder of the trend will be late-comers fighting over scraps (e.g, bitcoin mining, getting a law degree, web startups in the 2000s, getting into machine learning and designing self-driving cars, etc). True economic edges, the ones that make people extraordinarily wealthy, come from knowledge that is going to be important but people don't currently recognize yet as such. This means time is of the essence with regards to economic information.

You can sit for months, but all you are doing is hoarding dead, useless, historic arcana: Big abstractions and high ideals, but nothing new or meaningful.

Living, useful information must be sought out in a timely manner.