The Age of Information Bloat
How temperance of our attention is needed more than ever
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme. This month we’re exploring virtue.
This Week at a Glance:
This week we dive into the third virtue of the Stoic’s Four Cardinal Virtues: Temperance. Also known as moderation, temperance helps us keep balance in the world. It is about preventing ourselves from indulging or limiting too much.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 How our focus and attention are being hijacked today;
🍬 Why it is so important to be aware of our actions;
🍫 Why it is important for one to take stock of the material they take in.
When the internet was first introduced to the general public, there was excitement and hope around how it was going to revolutionize how the world worked. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the creators of the World Wide Web, had the vision it was going to serve humanity for the better:
“I had hoped that 30 years from its creation, we would be using the web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity. Projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the world of open source software are the kinds of constructive tools that I hoped would flow from the web.”
While the internet has revolutionized the world, it has also, for better or worse, changed the entire landscape of how we human beings live our daily lives.
With the internet as we know it, and with the AI revolution upending the landscape once again, the number one problem we face is information bloat.
Once people got online, they were basically free to create whatever they wanted (given the accessible technology at the time). Blogs skyrocketed to stardom, the news went online, and social media unleashed the firehose of content creation.
“We are shaped by that to which we attend,” the writer Nate Anderson once wrote.
We all therefore must contend daily with not just the question of what we want to take in, but what kind of life experience we wish to have given the content we consume and the mass at which we consume it.
In essence, we must contend with the existence we are shaping based upon the inputs we are consuming.
With the internet’s ability to democratize content, now anyone can get online and start creating. If ten years ago you said your side hustle was being a YouTuber, most people would laugh, but today, it is an actual livelihood for many and even extremely lucrative for some.
But when you have so many people with the power to create, it means you’re now flooding the marketplace with content. As such, we’re now perpetually inundated with new content, so much in fact that the algorithms we all have come to loathe are in fact playing a vital role in serving us chunks of what we want to see. In other words, there is so much content from those we enjoy following that without the algorithms, we would never even see most of it. Content has become so paramount to our time that Gen Z is watching more YouTube and live streams on social platforms than they are tv shows or movies.
The drive for our attention is greater than ever before. But this constant consumption of content is having drastic ramifications on our lives. A lot of us are now normally sacrificing not only time, a non-renewable resource, but also focus, also a non-renewable resource (arguably, in today’s day and age, the most valuable resource we can possess). What we put our attention to dictates the type of life we will have.
Much of our attention, however, has devolved to be reminiscent of the dog Dug in Pixar’s movie Up—attentive until a squirrel runs by, or in our case, receive a message, notification, or ping that draws us to the app that’s demanding us.
And with this comes a massive downside: an inability to distinguish what is worth taking in and what is not. Hence, our information bloat.
Earlier this year, professor Adam Kotsko wrote a piece for Slate wherein he advised on a disturbing trend he had been witnessing across his classes for several years: his students’ lack of ability to focus on the assigned readings and their overall comprehension of them.1
“For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts… Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.”
Part of the reason for this is we’re never without our phones. When we’re in a waiting room, or standing in line at the grocery store, or eating at a restaurant, we’re always engaged in one way or another with our devices.
Over the last several years, I myself have made concerted efforts to actually limit my phone usage entirely. To the chagrin of those in my life, I do not see messages or posts on social media and am extremely delayed in my responses. But this was a necessary step for me to shape the life experience I wanted to have.
It is in no way perfect, but I can say since leaving social media and curating my content intake to that which helps me grow professionally, it has been incredibly beneficial. I have more time to read the books I want, to process my thoughts more readily, and to write weekly like I enjoy. And an added benefit is I am also much happier, not only because I am not drawn into toxicities of online agendas or playing status games with others but because I accomplish more with my time.
The content we consume is similar to the food we eat. If we eat nutrient-dense food, our bodies and mind perform better, they are fueled by proper nutrition. But if we consume processed food, then we lack the healthy nutrients needed to live a good life.
Sam Harris once stated that “There is a difference between using your attention wisely, in a meaningful way, and perpetual distraction,” and this was essentially what I came to realize: the world we encounter is built by the world we take in.
That may seem paradoxical on the face of it but there is truth when one understands the cycle of attention. Where our eyes go, our mind follows. This is an evolutionarily wired system to keep us attentive of our surroundings and lived experience. Our peripheral fades and our eyes focus on that which is directly before us. So when we put our eyes on something, our mind immediately begins paying attention to what’s before it. If we put our phone before it and play a video, your eyes, and ultimately attention and focus, will adjust to it. Watch thousands of 60-second or less video clips and you’ll quickly begin to see the compounding effects of those actions.
The more we allow ourselves to be distracted by trivial content, the less time we have to focus on living what the Stoics would call the good life. The more we waste on content that doesn’t move the needle, the less time we have to improve the things that do.
Like with any change, it’s scary to let go of that which we know. It’s hard to reject technology when everyone seems to be on it 24/7. But when these thoughts entered my mind, I remembered what Seneca once wrote:
“Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realise how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.”
This is what the Stoics meant when they preached the virtue of temperance: moderation at every turn.
Moderation in what we consume.
Moderation in our actions.
Moderation with our time.
This is not to say that it’s not okay to watch videos or even be on social media. Sometimes we all need a way to relax and enjoy content, but what it does mean is we have to prevent ourselves from constantly allowing the content to dictate our lives. It’s one thing to watch a few videos, it’s another to spend three hours in perpetual doom scrolling or Reel skipping. These are dopamine absorbers and drain us of time, attention, and ultimately, our ability to place focus on the things that need to be focused on.
As the late David Foster Wallace once wrote, “The only choice we get is what to worship.” In other words, what we put attention to, what we ultimately focus on.
And in order to live the good life, we need the ability to distinguish the proper things to worship.
3-Bullet Summary:
Today there is such an overextension of content creation that our lives are filled with constant information bloat;
In order to manage this bloat, we need to better understand what we’re taking in and why that matters;
The good life is paved in our understanding of how to implement temperance into our daily existence so we can find proper meaning and purpose and not be drawn into the bloat of content that surrounds us all day. What we pay attention to and focus on matters.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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