Information Obsession - Tue, Sep 8, 2020

Are you a newsletter ?

I am obsessed with information. I want to know everything about everything all the time. Be it, newsletters, papers, books, podcasts, I am interested. That’s also the reason why I have not been able to leave Twitter, the only one I still have an account on. The ferocious pace at which information flows on that platform is amazing. Frankly it’s very exhausting, but I am addicted.

My primary reason of reading and wanting to learn so much is this need (read greed) for information. A greed that is driven by fear. We are living in this extended age of information, we have all the knowledge or help we need from the world available to us instantly. The amount of information has also enabled rampant misinformation, the tools created to spread the truth are being used to destroy it. Surprise, surprise. And I fear not knowing enough will one day land me in a situation where I will not be able to stand up against the bigotry flying around in the world. And with that fear, I have just been unable to stop myself.

When you are consuming information at such a ferocious pace, it becomes critical to curate your sources really really well. You just can’t go on reading everything about everything. After a point you will stop soaking in stuff and forget everything instantly. Believe me, I have tried. So you have to pick you battles, go wide or go deep. I have decided on the latter, I care about the education space too much to go too wide. I try to contain my readings to that and related topics.

While the core of my preferences are set, I keep flowing from one topic to another around it all the time. Law & Justice, Technology, Urban Planning, Public Health. All important spaces which have an integral role to play in education but I just have to narrow my lens a little when I am exploring them. Otherwise I go deep down a rabbit hole where it becomes difficult to come back from.

But this entire system has one major flaw. A flaw I am very well aware of, but keep falling for it. This is all learning about the world more or less removed from human stories. And I just don’t mean factual on-ground accounts, I mean stories around society, culture, art and even fiction! The natural breath that brings to your thought is priceless, and the happiness, while also not disintegrating your brain with constant information. A friend recently gifted me a new subscription of “Unbreaking news”, I am excited to try it. I know what I just said, I know it’s completely opposite to what I started with. How the turn tables!

TATA!

cube