JON GABRIEL: How to keep social media from rewiring your brain.

Those of us who spend too much time on social media (for me, it’s a job requirement) are all too familiar with the firehose of the latest news, trends and jokes. Within hours, they’ll be replaced by new topics just as meaningless.

Many experts have sounded alarms that this torrent of ephemera and the mad chase for clicks are rewiring brains, reducing attention spans and altering how we process information. Too often, our focus is locked on the transient and new as we abandon the meaningful and eternal.

Not wanting to waste so much of each day, I embarked on a new media journey. Or, should I say, a very old one.

At the start of the year, I cracked open “The Iliad” by Homer. Apparently the 3,000-year-old book is kind of a big deal, which is why every smart person I know has read it (or at least has claimed to). But, as with most classics, I had never quite gotten around to it.

It was a bit slow-going at first (I apparently chose a dated translation), but I soon fell into the rhythm of the brutal war epic. After a few days, I was done and … I actually enjoyed it.

Read the whole thing — and then maybe The Iliad.