Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

Addiction #29 – Freedom from INFORMATION
“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods
and errors.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
“The flood of information that swamps me daily seems to produce more pain than gain.
And it’s not just the incoming tidal wave of email messages and RSS feeds that causes me
grief. It’s also the vast ocean of information I feel compelled to go out and explore in
order to keep up.” ~ Paul Hemp
“The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a
fixed point of view slowly destroys everybody who has one.” ~ Brooks Atkinson
Let me initially state that the gathering information is not “bad” in and of itself. The
problem is not that we collect facts or that we strive to understand our world. Many
thousands of years ago, when our species was in its adolescence, our world was filled
with threats and dangers, and it was prudent to continually evaluate our surroundings in
order to survive. And today, in a modern world that is exceedingly complex and
sometimes quite confusing, gathering information in order to enhance the quality of our
lives remains a reasonable pursuit as well. It is helpful for us to notice the difference
between situations that are “healthy” and those that are not, and it makes sense to analyze
our surroundings in order to then be able to choose courses of action that are more in
alignment with our personal values and goals.
And yet for most of us, this reasonable pursuit of knowledge is no longer what motivates
us. In a world where imminent dangers are rare and legitimate information needs are few,
we have simply taken our “need to know” too far … way too far. And the problem is not
the massive quantity of information that we are accumulating, but rather what
information we are gathering, and how we are choosing to collect it.
According to the 2012 PEW News Consumption Survey, almost 60% of Americans
watch almost an hour of news on television every day. In addition, over half of all
Americans read or watch at least 40 minutes of news online each day, 33% listen to at
least 45 minutes of radio news each day, 25% read a newspaper for at least 30 minutes
each day, and over 20% get news reports daily via their social networks or on Twitter.
In a recent study, David Vance, assistant professor at Rutgers-Camden University,
extrapolated that a third of all BlackBerry users show signs of addiction similar to those
seen in alcoholics.
Quite obviously, we humans are literally “drowning in reality”; gasping and choking on a
constant deluge of “facts” and opinions – most of them negatively dreary or
provocatively fearful; a flood of information to which many of us have become literally –
and disastrously – addicted.
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