Too Much Information (also, fucking OOPS)

The fucking oops is just to reference the fact that it maaaaaaybe wasn't wise of me to get a full time job while being a full time student and also having a second part-time job. Oh, and the part-time job doubles as soon as May starts. And also there's a ticking clock situation with it where I really have to get on the part where I digitize old files because... someone just quit, and with them gone, the state of the office and my father's role in it seems suddenly much more limited. I'm selfishly almost hoping my sister doesn't find a job in her field in the US and has to come home, but not really because it makes her life 10x more complicated. 

But there's another way of looking at that which is: how lucky I am to have so many things to do. How lucky I am to have money coming in. How lucky I am to have this opportunity to save. Not even necessarily all luck, either; I've worked hard to get that full-time job (the part time one is sheer luck of the genetic lottery). Last summer I earned $0. This summer I will earn over $10K, maybe even $15K if I really grind (this isn't counting the money I will be spending, of course, but still). That's a safety net for when I graduate, potentially unemployed. I feel like I've actually done something about things that I'm insecure and worried about. And anyway... the summer will end. And there will be more of them. 

The TMI thing is in reference to the latest thought I've been having about social media, and now the internet more generally, which was, to be fair, brought to me through a youtube video. There's this vein of philosophical thought that apparently it's not necessarily the best thing to be living in an information age. There's so much information coming at us all the time, and a lot of it is entertainment. Actually probably most of it is. I'm really bastardizing this, but I've only just begun to explore the idea and connect the dots.

Anyway, I thought about this tonight as I went to play a game on my phone (I've stopped scrolling individual tumblrs and it has in fact removed the urge to get one) and thought maybe I should listen to a podcast while I did so. For a while in February and March, I had a few podcasts I'd listen to while I cleaned at my part-time job, and I was actually caught up with them. I really enjoyed that feeling. Then stuff happened, like a family trip, and I am now weeks behind. I had this anxiety as I thought about it, like ugh, I have to catch up on my podcasts. And then I was like wait a damn second! What's this "have to"??? These fucking podcasts are supposed to be for fun. 

Remember a few entries ago when I talked about how I feel a sense of obligation to notifications? I think this plays into that. Notifications offer me information which claims to be urgent and important, but usually it's neither. It's interesting, and might even be fun, but as the last month proved, I don't need it. My life is just fine without it. But now I can see that I still consume a lot of information. In fact, last month I signed up for like 5 different substack newsletters to get even more information. And I realized today while trying to catch up on these emails that I was treating them all like an obligation before I realized hey, I don't actually care about this topic, I can just... not read this.

It's truly only hitting me now that I will never, ever be able to keep up with the sheer scale of information on any given topic. I'll never be truly well-informed. None of us can be anymore. There is so much stuff out there, and what's even worse is that a lot of it is just inane garbage. Some of it (which yes, does overlap with inane garbage, but not totally) is just fun stuff, fluff, no substance. I've often been floored by the sheer number of books that just exist (like JUST thinking about each individual title, there have been SO MANY books written and published) but this is going beyond, to just think about how much information and data there is, including some that I'm producing right now. And boy have I been trying to hoard it. 

I think THAT might be the next experiment. What kind of information am I taking in? Why am I taking this in? What do I consider important to know? What do others consider important to know? And just in general letting go of this obligation I have to consume everything. I think that has made me broadly knowledgeable and I can think of a handful of times having obscure knowledge has just come in handy, but ... something feels off. 

Being off social media cut me off of lots of information. Most of it wasn't really that high quality. I'd go back and look at some things to laugh or to get information, I found some crochet patterns I enjoyed, I followed local news... but I also spent time curating collections of information. I still do this. I like to collect things, and I didn't realize I was doing that with information. I don't know that I want to spend my time that way. I don't like how pressured I feel to take in everything. Did you know that for a while I'd look at every piece of baby/child development/parenthood/motherhood content that came my way, just in case/for later? Like what was I doing? As if that stuff wouldn't be available to me later, IF I even choose to pursue that life (or even if I do pursue it, if I choose to look into all that!). I was able to stop that habit, but I can see that things are more ... entrenched than that. 

I also want to be careful here, though. I don't know that I totally agree yet that having access to a lot of information is all bad. It certainly seems silly to claim that. I want to think critically about whether information is always the solution, though. Just now while writing this when I said "I don't know that I totally agree" my first instinct to rectify this was to ... look for more information on the topic from a different bias/ideological slant. Why not look inside myself? Why not reflect more deeply on what I already know, perhaps by revisiting it? Why not pore over old information? Goodness knows I've collected enough of it. 

Something is telling me that there is a part of learning that involves sitting, reflecting, thinking, absorbing, combining, curating, etc that isn't just reading, watching, or listening to something new. And that I have been doing primarily that- just taking it in. I've had the urge more than once to sit with some information and really process it and I stuffed that urge down in favor of consuming more information. Because I needed to check off another book on my goodreads list. Because I need to catch up on my podcasts. Because I need to look through the rest of this new song playlist apple music generated to see if there are any good songs. THE WORLD IS SO FUCKING ABUNDANT WITH ABSTRACT STUFF!!! I will NEVER get through it all! Why am I trying to? What am I losing in the process?

I don't really have an answer to all that. The theme of this post is that life is abundant. And I am overwhelmed.