With our thanks to Shashank Sharma on @Substack
Informational obesity will kill you.
But first, it will dumb you down. Actually, it already is. You know it yourself. You wake up, pick up the phone and begin eating information before your brain has even brushed its teeth. By breakfast, you have consumed a war, 4 political opinions, 7 LinkedIn sermons, a celebrity divorce, someone explaining quantum physics in 43 seconds, another person telling you why coffee is killing you, and a podcast clip in which a 24-year-old millionaire explains how waking up at 4:37 AM changed his life.
I know it is relatable and you are smiling, but your brain was never designed for this buffet.
For most of human history, information was expensive. Books had to be copied by hand, libraries were limited, newspapers came once a day, and knowledge often required finding someone who actually knew something.
But today, information is effectively infinite.
You can sit on the toilet and encounter more ideas, arguments, headlines and opinions in 20 minutes than your great-grandfather encountered in a month.
Has that made us proportionately wiser?
I doubt it.
We increasingly know a little about everything and understand almost nothing deeply. A 60-second reel gives us enough vocabulary to feel informed about geopolitics, psychology, nutrition, relationships or economics. Then we walk into conversations carrying 11 half-digested facts and the confidence of a man who has personally advised the United Nations.
That is informational obesity.
The problem with overeating food is that the body eventually shows it. But informational overeating is more deceptive because you can mistake consumption for intelligence and feel intellectually active because your thumb has travelled 3 kilometres today.
But exposure is not understanding. Reading is not thinking. And knowing that something happened is not the same as understanding why it happened, what it means or whether it matters.
I have started believing that intellectual health will increasingly depend on refusal. Which article deserves 20 minutes? Which book deserves 10 hours? Which person deserves access to your head? Which piece of information will actually change how you think? So, in a world where information is infinite, wisdom may depend less on how much you can consume and more on what you are willing to ignore.
Because informational obesity has the same tragedy as physical obesity: You can be completely stuffed and still terribly undernourished.
The dedication of this piece is to Hannah Eichler @hannaheichler on @XComms
