Now, I’m not one for ultra-efficiency in life- I think a lot of the actual business of living can be lost in mostly futile attempts to organise your time into precise and regimented blocks of needle-moving activity and obligations. Those diagrams of Benjamin Franklin-like daily routines where life is eked out in accounted-for 15 minute increments fill me with a specific queasy dread.
It's not necessarily like that. A lot of people use it to structure their day, as a sort of guide, a helpful reference, rather than a slave-driver there to beat them into submission.
Over-planning is definitely a trap that I've fallen into, but you can plan like that and still be able to adapt (and not stick to the schedule)
It's just nice to be able to look and say 'okay, this is what I want to be doing now'
Is there anything the old G himself hasn't been proven right about in the end?
Google IQ is another catchy term for the phenomenon you're talking about her - no need to learn or understand anything in depth if you can just Google it - outsourced thinking.
"See, the paradox of the modern world is that the wisest people I encounter are invariably the most ignorant."
Going to use this the next time my parents give out to me for not knowing jack about current events - my internet friend Tom says it means I'm actually wiser than you are.
"Such need for affirmation kills the intuitive, it blocks out the serendipities that come from just having a go at something, in ignorance, like a child trying to figure out how a toy works."
Leading to the inevitable "paralysis by analysis" of course. I would say the current generation of people is probably the most separated from their instincts than any that have come before it.
Dave Chapelle had a realisation like this about learning things face-to-face - he realised that basically everything he knew was from hearing about someplace or reading about it on the internet, but he really had no idea if it was bs or not.
So he spent a few years travelling around the world and the US, and talking to people and realised basically everything he had read was false, and his mind was stuffed full of pre-conceived notions and prejudices he didn't even know he had.
Makes you think eh?
The majority of people I speak to in Ireland, friends and family included, genuinely believe that America is some sort of hellish dystopia on the verge of civil war at any given moment.
Really? I mean it's probably extremely normal, if not boring in 95% of it. It's a staggeringly big place after all, and despite what the news-cycle shows you, I imagine the average person gives about as much of a shit about politics as you do.
Great post Tom, and great advice too. I'm sure it's a common problem for the curious types that read these articles - myself included.
As someone who has taken your work to heart and outside of work now spends virtually zero time online, posts like this are wonderful reminders of all I've learned from reading your work.
Thanks for a brilliant piece, Tom. I shall admit that I like looking things up although recently I've started doing it less or with a different attitude. Simply speaking of googling things up, I often stumble upon two categories of things - certain (terms, facts, definitions, etc.) and uncertain (e.g. your example of looking up for diet). In the first case, the results are pretty good and it makes sense to look them up. The curiosity is rewarded. But the second case demands to be lucky. Things that are prone to be biased and doesn't have the exact solution are hard to look up correctly if you don't know where to start and have no idea about the topic. If I am not a nutritionist I can't recognise "the best diet ideas for 2021" among the shit load of SEO boosted garbage. That's the exact problem of looking those things up - they aren't optimised to be correct, they are optimised to be seen, convincing for rookies, but they are unusable if you dare to click the second page of google search results (which not many people do).
Going back from "googling thing up" to "looking things up" in general. My writing got better (subjectively) when I stopped trying to verify every single sentence (doubtful decision). I always have an itch to "look a thing up" if I'm not certain about what I'm writing about. But It's easier and *oh my god* more productive to cut uncertain pieces than trying to verify them. So I truly believe that the question is not "to look up, or not to look up" but "what exactly to look up" or "what MUST be looked up". Some things really require this and I learned this not an easy way. But most of the things are just FOMO, impostor syndrome and other psychological anxieties. Identifying them aka navigating in the shit ocean of content is the skill one needs to master.
That's it. I'm not even reading the comments today. Maybe next sunday, after a whole week of not-looking-things up. Only then I may start to dwell on where my interpretation went wrong ...
Provocative and timely piece, but I do wonder if you've buried the lede here. Is it a matter of not looking things up or having the discernment to differentiate what is worth looking up and not? Is it about learning from people face to face or about discerning what one can and can't learn from conversation?
It reads to me as a disguised sermon on the virtue of prudence. All it's missing is a diatribe against the common practice of spending more time researching what can opener to buy than the question of how to live one's life.
Of concern though there seems to be a dissonance between the advisement of discernment and the example of diet research as a waste of time. I know plenty of folks who couldn't be bothered to ask questions about diet until it was too late. You seem to flirt with relativism and recommending that any difficult question is not worth bothering with. But what important question isn't difficult?
As always, love reading your work. I wanted to share two things that came to mind from this. First, we naturally seek to trust others and not ourselves, but you have to trust yourself. Second, a quote from the book How to Actually Change Your Mind: “make yourself the source of every thought worth thinking.” Thanks Tom.
Indded. Death by inaction, as a result of information overload. There is a soothing comfort in looking things up, because you naively think you'll be able to eliminate risk from the process. How many times have I looked things up telling myself "just one more tutorial about X subject, and I'll be able to nail it perfectly the first time ! Just one more video on this subject and I'll be able to explain it more clearly". But the truth is, the more you look things up, the more you see things you were not supposed to see so soon in the process. The more you look things up, the more you doubt, and the less you're prone to action. So you never act. But because of this pernicious cycle, you feel good about it, because really, it's not that you're not "doing" anything, you're just "setting yourself up for the win" (clever boï that you are).
You're like Max the taxi driver in Collateral (excellent movie by Michal Mann), who's been driving a cab for 12 years while accumulating business plans and spreadsheets to "someday" open his own limo company... And it's painful to see that he never will. Max probably looked a lot of shit up in those 12 years.
In the days before Internet, you'd just ask an acquaintance who'd vaguely knew something about the subject and that was it; you didn't really have much more room to move past that. So you were forced either to act or to accept that you weren't gonna do it. But thanks to the Internet and the information era, you can easily spend years crafting your little project in your head. 50 years ago, a guy wanting to write a book would just... start, and alea jacta est. Now, he feels the need to subscribe to a few creative writing classes, an online community and probably a few hundred hours of motivational writing videos/advices. But will is a fragile thing, and if you don't act quick enough, it eventually gets diluted amongsts the doubts and new shiny ideas. How many of us know people who are always full of ideas but act upon/finish none of them ?
"Such need for affirmation kills the intuitive"
And that's the final issue here. Intuition is a good thing. It's a thousand-years old biological weapon created by our brain in order to force us to act. But between the impostor syndrome and the information overload, it gets drowned and like every cognitive funtion, the less we use it, the worst it gets. Spend enough years looking things up and not building things, and you'll end up truly lost. A modern tragedy.
Excellent newsletter Thomas. See you on the Discord ;)
I tend to think that the ease of access to information and answers is as convenient as it is overwhelming. It’s an intellectual equivalent to the problem my kids face: when faced with too many choices (toys/ activities), the easiest and quickest choice is the obvious one (probably screens instead of toys). When you’re bombarded by choice and information you tend to either become distracted or give up.
Brilliant, Tom. Here is an issue I'm faced with: knowing that I can access some knowledge I come across (not seeking) at a later date, I cease to capture the essence of that knowledge. As such my mind is so much a series of approximations. I know that Johnson said something about...I know that Thoreau writes about, around this time, in reference to this group of people...but I couldn't tell you more detail than this (sometimes). I have too often severed, cut short, my own immediate experience. We cannot, must not, outsource our own minds to the internet. We cannot, must not, trade our capability of present knowledge acquired with difficulty to the possibility of future knowledge acquired with ease. "Let your real world experience be your teacher." In other words, not your Google search power, not your note-taking app proficiency, not your growing stream of Twitter likes. Yes.
Now, I’m not one for ultra-efficiency in life- I think a lot of the actual business of living can be lost in mostly futile attempts to organise your time into precise and regimented blocks of needle-moving activity and obligations. Those diagrams of Benjamin Franklin-like daily routines where life is eked out in accounted-for 15 minute increments fill me with a specific queasy dread.
It's not necessarily like that. A lot of people use it to structure their day, as a sort of guide, a helpful reference, rather than a slave-driver there to beat them into submission.
Over-planning is definitely a trap that I've fallen into, but you can plan like that and still be able to adapt (and not stick to the schedule)
It's just nice to be able to look and say 'okay, this is what I want to be doing now'
Just wanted to give a more nuanced view of it.
Is there anything the old G himself hasn't been proven right about in the end?
Google IQ is another catchy term for the phenomenon you're talking about her - no need to learn or understand anything in depth if you can just Google it - outsourced thinking.
"See, the paradox of the modern world is that the wisest people I encounter are invariably the most ignorant."
Going to use this the next time my parents give out to me for not knowing jack about current events - my internet friend Tom says it means I'm actually wiser than you are.
"Such need for affirmation kills the intuitive, it blocks out the serendipities that come from just having a go at something, in ignorance, like a child trying to figure out how a toy works."
Leading to the inevitable "paralysis by analysis" of course. I would say the current generation of people is probably the most separated from their instincts than any that have come before it.
Dave Chapelle had a realisation like this about learning things face-to-face - he realised that basically everything he knew was from hearing about someplace or reading about it on the internet, but he really had no idea if it was bs or not.
So he spent a few years travelling around the world and the US, and talking to people and realised basically everything he had read was false, and his mind was stuffed full of pre-conceived notions and prejudices he didn't even know he had.
Makes you think eh?
The majority of people I speak to in Ireland, friends and family included, genuinely believe that America is some sort of hellish dystopia on the verge of civil war at any given moment.
Really? I mean it's probably extremely normal, if not boring in 95% of it. It's a staggeringly big place after all, and despite what the news-cycle shows you, I imagine the average person gives about as much of a shit about politics as you do.
Great post Tom, and great advice too. I'm sure it's a common problem for the curious types that read these articles - myself included.
As someone who has taken your work to heart and outside of work now spends virtually zero time online, posts like this are wonderful reminders of all I've learned from reading your work.
Conor
Thanks for a brilliant piece, Tom. I shall admit that I like looking things up although recently I've started doing it less or with a different attitude. Simply speaking of googling things up, I often stumble upon two categories of things - certain (terms, facts, definitions, etc.) and uncertain (e.g. your example of looking up for diet). In the first case, the results are pretty good and it makes sense to look them up. The curiosity is rewarded. But the second case demands to be lucky. Things that are prone to be biased and doesn't have the exact solution are hard to look up correctly if you don't know where to start and have no idea about the topic. If I am not a nutritionist I can't recognise "the best diet ideas for 2021" among the shit load of SEO boosted garbage. That's the exact problem of looking those things up - they aren't optimised to be correct, they are optimised to be seen, convincing for rookies, but they are unusable if you dare to click the second page of google search results (which not many people do).
Going back from "googling thing up" to "looking things up" in general. My writing got better (subjectively) when I stopped trying to verify every single sentence (doubtful decision). I always have an itch to "look a thing up" if I'm not certain about what I'm writing about. But It's easier and *oh my god* more productive to cut uncertain pieces than trying to verify them. So I truly believe that the question is not "to look up, or not to look up" but "what exactly to look up" or "what MUST be looked up". Some things really require this and I learned this not an easy way. But most of the things are just FOMO, impostor syndrome and other psychological anxieties. Identifying them aka navigating in the shit ocean of content is the skill one needs to master.
Cheers,
John
I attempted to write about this in a tweet earlier today and nobody got what I meant. This sums it up perfectly. Excellent as always.
That's it. I'm not even reading the comments today. Maybe next sunday, after a whole week of not-looking-things up. Only then I may start to dwell on where my interpretation went wrong ...
Hey Tom,
Provocative and timely piece, but I do wonder if you've buried the lede here. Is it a matter of not looking things up or having the discernment to differentiate what is worth looking up and not? Is it about learning from people face to face or about discerning what one can and can't learn from conversation?
It reads to me as a disguised sermon on the virtue of prudence. All it's missing is a diatribe against the common practice of spending more time researching what can opener to buy than the question of how to live one's life.
Of concern though there seems to be a dissonance between the advisement of discernment and the example of diet research as a waste of time. I know plenty of folks who couldn't be bothered to ask questions about diet until it was too late. You seem to flirt with relativism and recommending that any difficult question is not worth bothering with. But what important question isn't difficult?
As always, love reading your work. I wanted to share two things that came to mind from this. First, we naturally seek to trust others and not ourselves, but you have to trust yourself. Second, a quote from the book How to Actually Change Your Mind: “make yourself the source of every thought worth thinking.” Thanks Tom.
Indded. Death by inaction, as a result of information overload. There is a soothing comfort in looking things up, because you naively think you'll be able to eliminate risk from the process. How many times have I looked things up telling myself "just one more tutorial about X subject, and I'll be able to nail it perfectly the first time ! Just one more video on this subject and I'll be able to explain it more clearly". But the truth is, the more you look things up, the more you see things you were not supposed to see so soon in the process. The more you look things up, the more you doubt, and the less you're prone to action. So you never act. But because of this pernicious cycle, you feel good about it, because really, it's not that you're not "doing" anything, you're just "setting yourself up for the win" (clever boï that you are).
You're like Max the taxi driver in Collateral (excellent movie by Michal Mann), who's been driving a cab for 12 years while accumulating business plans and spreadsheets to "someday" open his own limo company... And it's painful to see that he never will. Max probably looked a lot of shit up in those 12 years.
In the days before Internet, you'd just ask an acquaintance who'd vaguely knew something about the subject and that was it; you didn't really have much more room to move past that. So you were forced either to act or to accept that you weren't gonna do it. But thanks to the Internet and the information era, you can easily spend years crafting your little project in your head. 50 years ago, a guy wanting to write a book would just... start, and alea jacta est. Now, he feels the need to subscribe to a few creative writing classes, an online community and probably a few hundred hours of motivational writing videos/advices. But will is a fragile thing, and if you don't act quick enough, it eventually gets diluted amongsts the doubts and new shiny ideas. How many of us know people who are always full of ideas but act upon/finish none of them ?
"Such need for affirmation kills the intuitive"
And that's the final issue here. Intuition is a good thing. It's a thousand-years old biological weapon created by our brain in order to force us to act. But between the impostor syndrome and the information overload, it gets drowned and like every cognitive funtion, the less we use it, the worst it gets. Spend enough years looking things up and not building things, and you'll end up truly lost. A modern tragedy.
Excellent newsletter Thomas. See you on the Discord ;)
I tend to think that the ease of access to information and answers is as convenient as it is overwhelming. It’s an intellectual equivalent to the problem my kids face: when faced with too many choices (toys/ activities), the easiest and quickest choice is the obvious one (probably screens instead of toys). When you’re bombarded by choice and information you tend to either become distracted or give up.
Brilliant, Tom. Here is an issue I'm faced with: knowing that I can access some knowledge I come across (not seeking) at a later date, I cease to capture the essence of that knowledge. As such my mind is so much a series of approximations. I know that Johnson said something about...I know that Thoreau writes about, around this time, in reference to this group of people...but I couldn't tell you more detail than this (sometimes). I have too often severed, cut short, my own immediate experience. We cannot, must not, outsource our own minds to the internet. We cannot, must not, trade our capability of present knowledge acquired with difficulty to the possibility of future knowledge acquired with ease. "Let your real world experience be your teacher." In other words, not your Google search power, not your note-taking app proficiency, not your growing stream of Twitter likes. Yes.