TMI

There was a Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia set in a bookcase in the dining room of my childhood home. When I was old enough to read and to know what an encyclopedia was, I would spend hours sitting on the floor by the bookcase, pulling out random volumes and reading about...whatever. I was addicted to knowing stuff. Fast forward way too many years and the child I was is still spending hours, now sitting on the sofa with a laptop, clicking on random links and reading about...whatever. I'm still addicted to knowing stuff.

Some people doom scroll. I fun scroll. Instructions for origami bats that flap their wings. Recipes for low fodmap gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate oatmeal cookies. Luddites! I want to know more about Luddites! The IMDb! Who played Reverend Mother Mohiam in Dune: Part 2? Oh, look - a video of someone catching smallmouth bass on the Mississippi in Minneapolis. And another video on how to tie a fly to catch them on! I also news scroll, of course. And weather scroll. And “Oh, this looks like an interesting article” scroll. And “What did he say now?” scroll.

When one is addicted to knowing stuff, Too Much Information can be one's drug of choice. And like all addictions, knowing stuff requires ever-increasing amounts of one's devotion.* I can pat myself on the back for not turning on the television all day, or at least, until the 10 pm news, but can I make it past 7 am without going online and seeing if the Google News headlines have changed since I read them last night? Only if I've overslept. And the fact that I access all my information on an aging laptop rather than on my phone does not allow me to score points for being any sort of a technological Luddite. Where once I might have given up watching all television for Lent, the closest I've come to giving up knowing stuff for Lent is to rein it in a bit, check my email once a day, read the news once a day, look at facebook for no more than five minutes, once a day. Limiting myself to actual paper newspapers or spending time that I normally would have spent online reading books – real paper books – may make me feel more noble, but I need to face the fact that I'm still in some way feeding my addiction to knowing stuff. Don't get me wrong - I am grateful for the World Wide Web and the almost immediate access I have to information. It's saved dinner many a time. It's fixed potential household disasters. It's helped me navigate a myriad of medical issues. But how Much Information is Too Much Information? Do I even recognize the hold the information highway has on my life? Am I willing to ask the Luddite question: What have I gained in my access to unlimited information and what have I lost? The spiritual question I ponder is this: How much do I really need to know if I already have an all-knowing God? Am I usurping His place in my life in some way, depending on myself and my online life to have the “right” information immediately to go forward with my life? How much am I depending on Him and how much am I depending on the sometimes dubious information that the internet is always willing to provide? Is my first inclination to pray, to turn to that all-knowing God when I think I need to know something?

*Funny story about trying to attribute the original source of this quote. I'll save it for tomorrow.