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This couldnât have come at a better time. 17 weeks seems like a conservative estimate though. The problem goes beyond the news or the algorithm: itâs that we are always going to want to know more about whatever we encounter, and since information is so readily available, we are not accustomed to resisting the urge even when the subject is trivial. It doesnât even need to be interesting; itâs mostly about avoiding the discomfort of uncertainty or the feeling of being uninformed. Giving yourself permission to be ignorant can be a challenge if your ego is tied up in knowing something about everything, but itâs probably the only way to maintain the kind of clarity youâre talking about for the things that matter.
Thereâs also the related âhaystack made of needlesâ issue Burkeman refers to in âToo Much Information: The Art of Reading and Not Readingâ from Meditations for Mortals:
The real trouble, according to the prominent techno-optimist Clay Shirky, wasnât information overload but âfilter failure.â All we really needed â and would presumably imminently get â were more sophisticated ways to filter the digital wheat from the chaff.
It didnât exactly work out that way. What happened, instead, was a textbook case of the âefficiency trap.â Itâs true that the filters got much better: technologies such as Amazonâs recommendation engine are an excellent way to discover things to read, while social media, at its best, is like having thousands of unpaid assistants scouring the globe for content youâre likely to find particularly fascinating. But the result, as I assume youâd agree if youâve been active online these last few decades, hasnât been greater sanity or calm. Since the incoming supply of genuinely interesting stuff is effectively limitless, improving the efficiency with which you discover it just means youâre bombarded with books, articles, podcasts and videos that seem like they might contain a nugget of wisdom critical for your happiness or professional success. The challenge isnât to locate a few needles of relevance in a haystack of dross. The challenge, in the words of the technology critic Nicholas Carr, is figuring out how to deal, day in day out, with âhaystack-sized piles of needles.â
Not everything will be as useless as the 1970s political debate. Much of it is generally valuable and interesting, but there is more than you could ever consume and no time to process or reflect on any of it .
Burkeman suggests letting go of the guilt attached to not knowing and the obligation to get to everything on your reading list. Maybe letting go of the list altogether would be worthwhile. I stopped hoarding useless knowledge in Obsidian, but Iâm still stockpiling useless future knowledge by building an endless backlog of unread articles in raindrop or videos in my watch later playlist on youtube. Even though I will never read or watch 90% of them, I canât quite bring myself to delete them because it would feel like instantly becoming less intelligent, since each one represents something I will never know.
Thereâs also the pure bandwidth issue. Even the information you donât actively pursue or engage with is adding to the noise. Just scrolling through a twitter feed or a subreddit is mentally exhausting because of the density in how it is presented and the constant jumping between unrelated topics. Youâre constantly expending mental energy to tread water in an ocean of information.
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@wcsherrod Great post. Could you kindly remove yourself from my head 
? Because your thinking correlates with mine up to a point.What was that old quote they said decades ago? âOrganisation is the death of an idea.â
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