I feel awash, perhaps adrift, in the amount of information I receive on a daily basis. Here is a short list of the real titles of things currently leaping up and down for me to read to become “informed”:
“James van der Beek, 47, Missed These Signs Before His Colon Cancer Diagnosis”
“Why Does My Child Struggle to Eat Fruits and Vegetables?”
“7 Times You Thought You Were Being Kind but Were Actually People Pleasing”
“Bride’s $3,000 Wedding Venue Nightmare: Walks Into and Empty Hall”
“POV: You Just Found Out that People who Said that This Sound Makes Your ADHD Brain Go Quiet Were Actually Right” (what?)
The idea that knowing more is better is quickly proving to make me feel like I actually know nothing. And the reaction to that is to try and protect a small space in your mind where there is order, where things make sense, where you feel like you’ve chosen to be. With so much endless crap to make sense of, it is comforting to have a place where you’ve chosen to accept and believe what is there without argument or persistence. So then, we really learn nothing.
And in a weird way what that does for each of us is to make us feel very alone. We are each alone with our small delicate tray of curated thoughts. My first reaction when someone shares something with me or sends me a link is…really? Maybe. We’ll never know. I feel a total lack of institutional trust which used to maybe be a source of truth but now feels, like everything else, a tool wielded to make me afraid, so I buy something. If I follow the string back far enough, it seems to always lead to me purchasing something.
So is it a desire to know less? Or actually a plea to quiet the white noise of stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff. Content. Ideas, hacks, shocking things that we’ve known about for years, shocking things we don’t need to know….etc etc. Because I actually want to know but I want to know fewer things better. I don’t want to read 15 articles, I want to read one really great article. I don’t want an endless stream of parenting advice, makeup tips, travel ideas, I want one or maybe two suggestions. I want to know something deeply, from a source or sources I trust, built slowly over time so that I can also involve myself in the process. When I am flooded with information, it is just that—it covers me, minimizing how I might actually feel or what I might know already. Expertise is information combined with knowledge, and in my opinion, the knowledge part gets swallowed up by information alone.
The dream is if we do that, maybe each of us knowing something really, really well, instead of each doing all our own searching and combing and collecting in the deluge of crap information, we will have a small collection of people we know and trust who we go to to learn when we need to.
I started writing this before the devastating fires in Los Angeles earlier this month. Combined with the heartbreak and sorrow these horrific events somehow always come with a strange information cycle. Some news outlet information, then grass roots information, then challenges to both, then a nuanced take, then live footage, them somehow that live footage is from another thing, then weaponized information, blame, shame, retractions, voids of information, voids of the right information, but have you thought about this information???????
And so I felt the information flood again but now I think I know what I really meant when I wrote the above. We’re trying to use information to communicate and process our emotions. It’s a triangulation of data trying to create the outline of our scared little selves. What did I really understand from this month’s events? I understood the human suffering. I understood the anger. I understood the fear. We want so desperately to make sense of it, but we have to add ourselves back into that information equation. And what ourselves tell us is people’s homes burned to the ground, people have nothing and this is unacceptable. That is what we know. And data and insights and graphs can all back that up, but the main thing to know is we cannot let this happen to each other.
And why isn’t that statement enough? Is is because we have become so used to not trusting information? So user to knowing too much garbage and not enough listening to emotional selves and the emotional selves of each other? I don’t know. I do know that something is wrong, I also know we are more similar than different, and that is what I want to know more about, that is the part I want to gain knowledge about. I think this idea of what is the nature of information and to be informed will be something BeSoothed explores more going forward.
If you are interested in helping the many people looking for help as a result of the fires, here is a list of gofundmes to send direct aid.
Stay safe.
Yes to all this. I have had to ration my intake of news for these reasons