Monday, May 3, 2021, 4:49 am

Information disaddiction

What if I told you one doesn’t need to know everything?

Seriously, there is something liberating about just letting go, relaxing, and living in the moment—without collecting MORE information.

Is this sentiment sacrilegious in this, the information age?

Perhaps we are entering a post-information age. We’ve had all of the information literally at our fingertips for a few decades now, not terribly long after someone may have just had to accept that they may never find the answer to the question that they were seeking... short of that stack of Encyclopædia Britannicas.

Society has no memory of how easy they have it. It wasn’t that long ago we had to call the radio station and ask the DJ (remember him?) what song had just played. Now we have Shazam. Or Google has a solid lyric finder if we remember the song in a dream (I can’t be the only one).

And Wikipedia has fountains of useless information, and the IMDb. We no longer need to wonder whatever happened to so-and-so... we can look up the information in nanoseconds.

Solipsistic. What a fantastic word! I was stunned to find this word was omitted from my cherished Doubleday Dictionary. In a time before the Internet, I’d have had to trek to that dreadful library to look up what it meant.

Yet, I persist we now have too much information. We are addicted to that high we get when we find out... and we’ve forgotten what it’s like to just bask in our ignorance—our bliss.

We need to become addicted to that high we get when we are truly aware. Get out of our heads, stop thinking, and be free.

I have reached the happy state of being indifferent to my surroundings.
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