You’re reading magazines wrong.

See, if you’re anything like me, you treat these magazine things* as highly disposable sources of information. You buy them (or steal them, I guess, and shame on you), read them once (if that) and then never touch them again.

You get that sweet, sweet content fix you were looking for. Then it’s over.

Maybe you throw the mags away. Maybe you store them in huge piles that threaten to tip over and bury passersby.

Either way, you’re missing out on the very best thing about magazines : they’re tiny time capsules that show us what (some small portion of) humanity thought was happening, what had happened, and what was going to happen. And they also show us that we don’t really have any clue about any of those things.

Let me explain…

Last year, I decided to throw away (or give away, at least) some old magazines. Look, I love analog – the feel of a good book, the design of a great magazine (and its handiness for reading you know where). But there’s only so much space in my humble abode (and commode), and magazines tend to be highly disposable.

So naturally, since I have attachment issues, I decided to read them again first. Kind of.

Here’s what I decided:

I would scan each mag for three nuggets of information I never knew, or forgot, and that might be worth remembering, or that served to teach me something in some way.

Then I would commit those snippets to memory.

Then I would send those mags on to their fate.

Yes, this is something a perfectly rational and not at all OCD adult might do – thank you for asking.

Anyhoo, here’s a few random things I’ve learned from the first hundred or so of them…
* Over the last 20 000 years, the human brain has probably shrunk in size by 10-15% – possibly a by-product of self-domestication for living in large groups and getting along. (This doesn’t mean that raging assholes have bigger brains, by the way.)
 * Nine out of 10 chickens prefer insect larvae to fish as a snack. So if you love your fowls, you’ll give them some grubs.
 * Garden roses can be picked at any time during the day, as long as they go straight into a bucket or a jug of cool water. And the best stage for picking is when the bloom is half-open, because it will hold this shape in the vase for a while. You’re welcome, lovers of roses, romance and last-minute Valentines gifts!
 * BF Skinner, that famed behaviourist, experimented with pigeon rockets in World War II. The rockets had space for 3 pigeons in the nose, each with a small movable screen in front of it, and the birds would be taught to peck at targets, keeping the rockets on track. But despite the fact that the birds were actually pretty awesome at their jobs, the bombs were never deployed.
 * Cocoa beans were a valid form of payment among Mayans and Aztecs in Middle America for centuries, especially popular amongst priests and kings. Says all you need to know, right there.

I think we can all agree that this is valuable information, well worth prime real estate in my brain.

A Tiny Time Capsule That Can Be Enjoyed On The Toilet
But besides random facts, magazines are also useful for getting a post-game sense of how trends spread.

Page through them, and you’ll see how one day nobody used infographics, and then a few folks got the hang of them, and a couple months later infographics were all the rage, and then somewhere down the line folks forgot about the info part of it; or you’ll see how one month mags treated Twitter as this strange, exotic beast, and then the next, every contributor had their Twitter account listed alongside their bylines.

Also, people love listicles, from 5 WAYS To Improve Your Chess Game to 10 Ab Blasting Exercises to 69 Ways To Please Each Other – and people seem to love reading basically the same lists over and over again.

Then there’s the real magazine gold – the stuff that shows that we don’t know what we’re on about.

By reading old magazines,you can learn…

Nobody knows when the revolution will come: The things that are totally, definitely going to change our lives soon are probably going to take a while to make a real impact (implanted devices, for example). Meanwhile, the things that seem like small but interesting developments may transform our lives beyond recognition in only a few years (remember a time before Wikipedia? Or Facebook? Heck, even Google isn’t legally able to drink yet.).

Picking winners is practically impossible: Hey, do you remember Google Wave? Or Buzz? That was totally gonna be the next big thing…but then, so was Blogger, and MySpace, and there was no way Microsoft was ever going to take second place in the tech revolution, and how could Apple ever unseat Blackberry’s smartphone dominance?

Today’s good guy is tomorrow’s bad guy is next week’s good guy is… Microsoft is evil. Apple is good. No, Google is evil, but Apple is still good. Wait, Apple’s evil, too, but Facebook is good. Hold up, Google good, Facebook bad. Wait, Microsoft ain’t so bad after all…but you’d better watch out for Amazon…

The human body is a bit of a mystery, but that doesn’t stop us talking about it: Carbs are good. Carbs are bad. All-protein diets are good. All-protein diets are killers. It doesn’t matter what you eat, as long as you exercise enough. Wait, exercise doesn’t really do anything.

Real journos strive for balance, even if it makes no sense: That’s why when you quote a renowned scientist from the Institute of We Do Research All Day Long, you should also quote some guy who disagrees with him, even if he’s from Cake-Hat-Wearing Kooks Incorporated.

Economic predictions are really iffy: Gold is always a good investment. Japan is going to be the world’s greatest economy. Real estate is the best investment. Unregulated markets never fail. The sharing economy makes everything different. Bubble? What bubble?

Magazines Get Stuff Wrong: So What?

Yeah, yeah, magazine articles tend not to be accurate all the time – especially when they’re trying to foretell the future. Some folks may be right some of the time, but trying to pull the signal out of all that noise is basically impossible. Who ever thought different?

Well, here’s the thing – magazines are really expensive to produce. Printing a handful of copies of Your Extra Special Garden Lovers Mag costs way more than just tweeting your latest thoughts, or posting a Facebook message, or writing a blog post (or a Pulse post, for that matter).

So people put a lot of effort and money into making content as awesome as they could (within reason), employing writers and editors and fact checkers and so on.

And yet, the result was still almost always entertaining confusion about the real state of things. Finding truth in old magazines, like finding truth on the web, is no easy quest.

All in all, reading old magazines is a useful reminder that Life Is Complicated – like , really, really complicated. And that you should take everything you read with a grain of salt.

Think for yourself, okay?

And remember, you’re probably wrong anyway.

*Magazines, for those of you who don’t know, are these rectangular objects made of pulped dead trees that contain articles on various subjects – like books, but cheaper, shorter (usually) and more colourful (usually). Or at least they were, before people discovered you could put them online or in apps and still use the same word for them. But I digress.