Years ago I came across a YouTube video titled something like:
You’re Eating Bananas Wrong!
Huh? Intrigued and a little apprehensive, I clicked on the video. Apparently, according to the video, the “correct” way to eat a banana is like a monkey, starting from this end:
Instead of this end:
Ok… but “wrong”? If you said 1+1=3, that would be wrong. But eating a banana from a different end? What does the word “wrong” even mean in this scenario? What outcome are we trying to accomplish? If your goal is to eat bananas in the same way monkeys eat bananas then yes, you would be wrong if you ate a banana from the long end. But since when was I, a human, supposed to emulate monkeys? They urinate, defecate and mate publicly, never wear clothes and commit infanticide. I generally don’t aspire to those things. Instead it would make a lot more sense to me if the goal of eating a banana was to, you know, eat the fucking banana. And how that is achieved is not very important. I know, what a concept right?
This is an example of how the rise of the internet, as great as it is, can have a less than informative side to it. Of course, the video’s goal was not to teach you the “correct” way to eat a banana, there isn’t one, the goal of the video was to get your attention. And it definitely achieved that with me. If instead the video was titled “How Monkeys Eat Bananas” it would have been more accurate, but would have received fewer clicks.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Here is a sample of some of the other things I’ve come across on the internet:
- Using takeout containers wrong
- Stirring coffee wrong
- Orienting toilet paper wrong
- Making your bed wrong
- Showering with the wrong water temperature
- Drinking water at the wrong time
- Eating with the wrong fork
- Topping your pizza wrong
“Wrong” is a relative term. It is relative to a goal, an objective you are trying to achieve. The problem with the examples I have given above is that the objectives relative to their “wrongness” is a matter of opinion and whose outcome has no ill effect on anyone else, including yourself.
These could be marketed differently. For example, pineapple goes on pizza. For at least the past decade the internet has been obsessed with this idea. Pineapple on pizza has no effect on anyone other than the person eating the pizza. No one’s life is on the line, there is no money at stake, and no time is wasted.
But when you present something as “wrong” with something as trivial as a pizza topping you tap into people’s primal instincts for tribalism and defining yourself based on what your rival is not. This could train you to treat other more serious topics in your life with less importance, and you probably aren’t even realizing it.
Directly conflicting information
On top of content meant to inflict emotion first and inform last, the internet is rife with seemingly conflicting information and advice. Every food is simultaneously healthy and unhealthy. Every political opinion is both demonic and exactly what the world needs. Many separate pieces of advice will be in direct conflict with one another, here are some examples:
| “Save and invest your money to retire as early as possible” | “Money is meant to be spent, not sitting in some bank account” |
|---|---|
| "No one ever got rich working a 9-5, you must start a business" | "No matter how much money you make, live below your means, invest the difference and you’ll retire rich" |
| “You have to grind. Be the hardest worker in the room. Stay hard. Work 100 hours a week” | “Your personal life is the most important thing. No one on their deathbed ever wished they worked more” |
| “You’re never too old to learn” | “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” |
| “You shouldn’t care what other people think” | “You should want to make a good impression” |
| “Eat to live” | “Live to eat” |
| “I see a lot of human beings but what we really need are more human ‘doings’” | “I see a lot of human ‘doings’ but not a lot of human ‘beings’” |
If you are like me, your gut reaction is to try to take all this information in, process it and make sense of it, all the while burning out mentally. If you are like a lot of other people, your gut reaction is to just choose the side you like better and disregard everything else.
Both approaches have their merit. If you ask me, being able to process information effectively is just as important as disregarding a lot of it.
Before we dive into how to deal with this, let’s get some perspective on how we got here:
A bit of history
Here’s a detailed chart of the last 10,000 years of human history:
Let’s start at the beginning of human civilization, about 2000 – 10,000 years ago. Generally, civilizations of this time were ruled by an elite minority and access to information was one of the key privileges these elites possessed. Writing ideas down was a very long arduous process. A single scroll would take at least hours to produce; an entire book could take weeks or months. And the Bible would take one scribe an entire year to produce. As such, books were extremely expensive and rare, only accessible by the kings, pharaohs, shahs or the very wealthy.
Most information was shared through stories by conversing with the local community people lived with. In general, most if not all the people you interacted with would have shared many of the same ideas and views on life and the world. Broad, multi-perspective thinking would have been rare, and it was easy to assimilate into your community by adopting the local ideology.
The printing press in 1454 revolutionized the world. The time needed to produce one book was improved 100-fold. Information was able to be spread more easily among the population, no longer relegating it exclusively to the elites. Printing presses got faster over the centuries and over time books became more widespread and cheaper.
Skip forward another 500+ years and we got the most recent revolution in information, the internet. Now, anyone in the world can write something and make it accessible to the majority of people on Earth. Now, information is as widespread as it has ever been, and it is as cheap as it has ever been.
But cheaper information comes at a cost. The information age, created by the internet, has brought a new angle to the equation: the average quality of information has decreased.
What to do
As of the writing of this article there are about 5.3 billion people with internet access. All of them have free access to post and contribute to the online melting pot of information. Knowing this, the first principle to navigating the endless sea of information is this:
Any bit of information is only relative to the author’s own reality.
Everyone is different. We all have different life experiences, skill sets, histories, traumas, personalities, likes, dislikes, values and principles we live by. A very wealthy person with secure finances might be willing to risk a small portion of their fortune on a start-up on the off chance it becomes the next Tesla. They might declare enthusiastically on a forum, “invest in this new company, it is the next big thing!”. Someone with struggling finances and 3 kids to feed might misinterpret what this person said and invest half their savings in this start-up only to have it crash 3 months later. The wealthy person didn’t mind losing their money because they had so much left over, but the poor person is financially devastated.
Or, an ambitious entrepreneur might tout “I wake up at 3:00 am everyday, and it has transformed my life. Everyone should do this.” Everyone? How helpful would that advice be to someone who is a natural night owl, has a job working nights and isn’t a natural entrepreneur. Absolutes like “everyone,” or “this is the best thing” are often explicitly or implicitly used in casual conversation when they are misleading and blatantly false. If literally everyone woke up at 3:00 am it would probably uproot our entire society.
The first thing you should consider when reading anything is to understand that it is only coming from the reality of the author, and that author is different from you. It is very possible that the advice they are giving will not work for you.
With that said, there are three skills I recommend to help you succeed in this world of information overload, and here they are, in order:
Know who you are
Know exactly who you are. Spend years, decades figuring this out. Figure out your values, the principles you live by, and most importantly don’t make the mistake of basing who you are on someone else. You need some foundation upon which you can take-in and interpret information, otherwise you are at risk of being seduced by someone else’s reality. If you don’t figure out who you are, you will become someone else, a confused shell of a person who bases who they are from what they see in other people. With this in mind you should be able to:
Call yourself out on your own bullshit, biases and hypocrisy
If you are able to do this, even to a middling degree, I believe you already have a huge leg up on most people in the world. This will make the next two principles much easier.
Recognize that the human brain can only take in so much information
The human brain is the most complex thing in the universe, that humans are aware of, but even it has its limits. Everyone’s cognitive capacity is slightly different but all are limited. No one can take in an infinite amount of information.
Unfortunately, since anyone can add content to the internet, without it being vetted, there is a plethora of low-quality content as well as content that is false or spreads lies. People’s information intake largely shapes who they are and if the brain power you are allotted on a given day is spent on consuming false, or deceitful information that can shape a large part of who you are.
What enters your brain contributes a huge amount to your mental health, which in turn will affect every area of your life. It has become easier than ever to consume low-quality or harmful information which can degrade your mental health. Schools should teach students to be aware of this.
“Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own” – Bruce Lee
I could have said it another way, but why try to re-word the legend himself? These words are truer today than they have ever been. The amount of useless information in the world, especially on the internet, is staggering and concerning. Being able to recognize what is useless and avoid it or discard it from your life is an essential skill in today’s world. The human brain, as amazing as it is, can only hold a finite amount of information, so filling it with bullshit, lies or unhelpful information is not going to be of service to anyone.
Seek quality sources of information
Not all information mediums are equal. You would do well to seek out sources of information that are of the highest quality. In general these are some high quality sources of information:
- Books
- Scientific papers
- Documentaries
- Yourself through deep meditation, self-inquiry and introspection
These next example are possibly good sources of information, but in general might not be up to par as the sources above:
- Podcasts
- YouTube videos
- Blog posts
- News articles
Finally these are in general, very low quality sources of information:
- Social media
- TikTok
- YouTube comments
These are not absolutes however. There are some terrible books and some great TikTok videos out there. But in general you should still opt more often for the higher quality sources of information if you want to get a deeper understanding of the world and who you are.
Avoid getting trapped in an echo chamber
The internet has pioneered the modern age of bombarding the world with information. Since the human brain can only process so much information at once, one solution to this problem has risen to the top, social media. A social media app like Instagram will do the heavy lifting of choosing what content you should consume. All you have to do is open the app, and the rest of the work will be done for you.
Social media has seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the past 20 years. It is estimated that of the 5.3 billion internet users, 4.95 billion of them use social media. The big social media companies of the world have found out that to make the most money possible, they must make their apps free and then hold people’s attention as long as possible. In other words, social media is optimized for time-on-site. Attention is their business model, and it turns out that what keeps people attention is feeding them information that they like.
Every social media user is unique so a tailor-made news feed has been designed to show them content that they are interested in. The problem with this is that the algorithms have figured out that most people are only interested in a very narrow range of topics. Most concerning is that many people only want to hear one side of political debates. When all you are exposed to is a narrow viewpoint of the world, that is meant to paint anyone who doesn’t share the same perspective as an enemy, what you get is a ripe recipe for division, hatred and, yes, sometimes violence. We’ve already begun to see this in the real world. Look no further than what happened in Washington DC on January 6th 2021. How do you combat this?
Actively seek out multiperspectivalism
You first have to become aware how social media, and the internet as a whole, operates and actively take a stand against it. You need to read things that present different points of view — things that make you uncomfortable. You actively need to seek out perspectives you haven’t thought of before. This may be difficult. It will take effort. But if sticking to a narrow-minded bubble results in a violent, divided world, maintaining the status quo will be a lot more difficult in the long run.
Conclusion (“But why?”)
Now and in the future, the most successful people will not be those who have access to the most information, but those who are able to process large amounts of information in the most effective way. If you want to know how to create a successful business and become wealthy and successful, the blueprint is there, accessible to all. If you want to become a monk and realize God, you can get access to great insights instantly. But unfortunately, in-between the gems, the nuggets of wisdom that will change your life are distractions, low-quality bullshit that will pull you down, render you unconscious and conflicted. We no longer have a lack of information, we have too much. We now need to learn how to navigate it. If schools don’t teach this, they better start now.
To be clear, conflicting information is not a bad thing; it is a good thing actually. It is one thing that can prevent the world from tipping into chaos by tyranny. But having the skills to be able to understand the information you are presented with is essential for navigating this new world. Conflicting information is here to stay, so we now need to learn how to live with it. If you read enough of what I write, you will inevitably come across conflicting statements and ideas. Some of these may be mistakes, but often they will be me exploring ideas from different perspectives. I hope with this I can not only help you see the world from my own perspective, but from other perspectives as well. If the majority of the human population were really able to look at complex information and situations in nuanced ways, seeing them as the complex things they are, I believe we would live in a world with much less violence and hatred, and more prosperity, love and happiness. Let’s create that world together.