As the last threads of the year unravel into our collective past, we naturally enter a period of mental stock-taking. It seems to be built into our unconscious, the seasons shuffling us jerkily forward as we grasp at them one by one and hope that we haven't wasted each. We could resist the tendency of course and ironically declare ourselves above the common desire for constant chronological validation. But that tends to be a wasted effort because there's often a truth buried in the things we do over and over. So this won't be a New Year's list of resolutions and goals, exactly. But I do want to work out a nagging idea that I think will grow in importance with each passing year. I am growing to respect the incredible latent power of carefully ignoring things.
That's not a popular concept I suppose. I'm aware that the spirit of our age is one that prizes knowledge and intelligence above almost all capabilities. We are a generation raised with the ability to summon vast stores of human learning at our whims. We live with decades of inbred experience teaching us that the proper resting condition of the human mind is acting as a passive funnel for a never-ending torrent of learning. And the flywheel cranks faster each year, forcing us to adapt our habits and sleep patterns and tools to keep from being broken by the demands of the information we swim in. Because above all, the cardinal sin in the Age of Information is the sin of ignorance.
Which is exactly why ignorance is becoming a weapon, a force for good if employed rightly. We are a people daily losing the truth deeper and deeper down a well of facts, unable anymore to discern what is important. We allow our anger and sorrow to be directed at one meaningless hourly cause after another, and seem unable to notice the strings we've attached to our own limbs anymore. What we need is not more facts, not another guru to shout to us, not yet more courses and longreads and pop explainers disguised as books. We need to start removing sources of information from our lives entirely. Perhaps then we will be able to pay attention to the things we already know that actually matter. We are losing our will to act, smothering it voluntarily under a mountain of data-driven escape clauses and well-actually caveats. And because we know more things at any one moment than a human brain was built to functionally process, anxiety and anger buzz away at the edges of every waking moment until we can hear little else.
But you can't be angry about the things you don't know about. You can't fear what you aren't aware of. And you can't feel guilty over things you didn't even know you weren't getting around to doing. And so my prescription for myself, and for you if you'll try it with me, is to spend this next year growing more comfortable with ignorance. Carefully pruning away sources of information that are acting to dump a torrent into my life that I truly cannot make proper use of. Refusing to allow myself to be tempted by the drive to have a meaningless opinion on that which will never directly affect me. Preferring to be thought naive, weak and foolish rather than to know myself to be distracted, angry and afraid. I'm going to intentionally limit the span of my supposed "knowledge" in the hopes that my wisdom will be given space to grow instead.
I can hear the objections already forming of course. Spending time in the crypto space, I am well aware of the working assumption that Discord and Twitter addiction are table stakes if you want any hope of serious portfolio appreciation. How will you stay ahead in a rapidly evolving space? You're just going to get hopelessly outside of the flow and become trapped in investments and strategies that don't work anymore. I understand the concern. But I actually have found that it is times when I am most plugged into the stream of data that I am least effective in acting on that data. The more information I have at my disposal, the more likely I am to freeze up at the critical moment, or talk myself into a poor deployment of capital that I can justify given this or that bit of chatter. Above a basic minimum amount of understanding and awareness, the flood of facts makes things worse as it grows.
But if I can narrow my sources, carefully and sometimes ruthlessly curating who I will allow to fill my mind? I find that I can actually put together insights and hold onto them. If I let go of the hopeless quest to master everything, I am actually able to focus on a few things and truly understand them. I can begin to advance towards some form of mastery. This gets even easier if I shut the door entirely on some projects or types of investment that I just won't pursue. Distractions make everything harder. Promising to make me erudite and encyclopedic, the firehose turns out to just fill me with a bloating stream of things I can't do anything about. It's the same whether we are talking about web3 alpha leaks, or national news, or tips and tricks for starting a business or writing a book. We all know people (I'm describing myself so it's very easy for me to relate) who are constantly spouting the article they read, or the facts they know that contradict your plan for action, or the reasons that "it's actually a lot more complicated." Our culture even has a name for this now, as we grow more aware of the corrosive power of an overabundance of knowledge. We call these individuals midwits.
What's a midwit? You've seen this meme everywhere, a bell curve describing three individuals' response to any issue. At one end sits a poor unintelligent rube, knowing so little. Pity his silly simple statement. In the middle is the midwit, about to receive our collective cultural mockery. A dense paragraph of rambling and contradictory opinion shows how very, very smart he is as he corrects the simpleton to his left. But what's this? As the curve narrows again, we see a quiet wise man (appropriately dressed in some sort of Jedi costume). And he simply reiterates the point made by the simpleton. Why? Because he is wise enough to see through the smokescreen of data and actually understand. He knows that even if the simpleton doesn't fully understand why he's right, he is right nevertheless. And that's more important than having technical and logical backing for your elaborate sand castle, but no wisdom to connect it to the real world.
This year, I want to be the person who has quietly ruminated on a few crucial things until they are a part of me, until they really change who I am and how I act. Anything else is just noise, after all. I want to avoid the temptation to screen my lack of initiative and fear of other's opinions in a cloud of drivel. It will take courage to be seen by others as, well, ignorant. But what could we gain if we were all willing to be thought fools by a few? I know I've found great peace already by realizing that the government will probably get along just fine without my careful weekly audits and unread performance reports that I diligently produced for years. I've found that all the time I save by not panicking over the state of churches I'll never visit in person has really freed me up to serve more effectively in the church I visit every week. Refusing to let my attention be kidnapped and my power to do something good be stolen by "important" things that I can't even experience directly, let alone change myself. At the very least, all this newfound time is going to take away a lot of my excuses.
You can feel the tide starting to turn as more people find themselves dissatisfied with pretending to be a global diplomat, hedge fund analyst and public health official rolled into one. We are realizing that this game isn't really returning us anything but anxiety and that our real lives remain left behind, suffering through neglect. We are beginning to suspect that human beings were created with finite abilities, and we had better be about making the most of what we can in our short lives. As local and small begins to supplant global and immeasurably large, even the technological tools that were previously our enemies will become allies. Because something as powerful as the internet, or web3, or a human brain can do amazing things once its’ power is focused. Once you choose what to ignore.
WGMI 😎
Your eyes can deceive you, don’t trust them. ~ Obi-Wan Kenobi
And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. ~ Ecclesiastes 1:17-18
You alluded to this multiple times, but I believe that one of the most important skills the aspiring internet hustler and modern day renaissance man can develop is the ability to quickly filter information and determine if it is useful or not. Like you mentioned, information overload and paralysis by analysis is a real ailment that can cripple your decision-making. Often times, we are better off being left with ambiguity and having to rely on our instincts - this is a better way to learn anyway.
YES