Fat with Information

If we're so f#cking smart these days, why are we still so f#cking miserable?

The I'll-be-happy-when machine. Smarter. Faster. Every miracle drug, every diet, the perfect life one more breakthrough away. And it never delivers, because the finish line moves every time you get close. Tech has been selling us that same finish line for years. Now everybody's losing their damn minds over AI. What's going to happen?

Long before this whole AI bullshit, I was in college when the internet just dropped. It was mostly nerds using it for research on the computers, and cool kids, like me, stealing music on Napster. But the promise of the internet age was that all the world's information was suddenly accessible. No need for boring libraries and fat books. Google search became the new thing. It became a verb. Google it. A substitute for thinking. Wikipedia and several other sites followed through the dot-com boom and bust.

And of course, you overlay that with the news boom. When I grew up in the nineties, we had cable news. CNN was the first one. I remember it being called the Clinton News Network, or the Crisis News Network, because everything was a always crisis. And it went from CNN to ten, twenty, thirty different news networks and countless news blogs. 24/7. Twenty-four hours was the new news cycle. The story was hot on Monday, forgotten by Tuesday. Then later, that got amplified by Twitter. Twitter launched in July 2006, and the news cycle became 140 characters, every 30 seconds.

And not just any news. We're talking calamity. Earthquakes happening on the other side of the world. Politics. Neighborhood watch stories. Knowing what all the Karens are doing on your block with the Nextdoor app. We suddenly became hyperaware of everything. Overwhelmed. Having to have an opinion, a feeling, on everything. Always made aware of stuff happening on the other side of the world as if we needed to have an opinion on it. But now we're worrying about something we have absolutely no fucking control over. Our brains weren't built for this.

As if it were some mystery on why our brains now feel like exploding, psychology studies have tried to figure out the fallout of these different tipping points. From when the internet first dropped, to cable news and the news cycle, to the internet's popularity, to social media, and now AI. Almost all concluding bad things are happening to humanity.

Steven Pinker book casts light on the positives. How this is actually the greatest time to be alive. The title is Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Research and all that. We are the most prosperous, not just in America but worldwide. Poverty is way down. Extreme poverty went from about 90% of the world's population to around 10%. There's more access to things. Of course, in America we get the spoils of all of it, right? Like anybody could literally do anything, buy anything, be anything. While also being exposed to everything all at once. All the news. All the feeds. All the music. All the videos. Everything.

Yet here we are. There's never been a time in history when people have been more depressed, more hopeless, more suicidal. More lethargic. More obese. We're not starving. We're obese. We're fat. We're fat with opportunity. Fat with information. It hasn't made us happier.

All this to say, it brings me to one of the oldest books. A slightly obscure book of the Bible. I call it the emo book of the Bible, because it's just so dark. Ecclesiastes. King Solomon. And he muses back and forth about all the knowledge, all the things that he's been able to accomplish, because he was, for his day and time, the personification of what we have now. He had all knowledge. Every experience. He talks about how he could eat whatever he wanted. He had servants. He had many wives. He had power. He had all this knowledge. And he grapples back and forth between knowledge and wisdom. And this gut feeling that he can't shake. That everything is fucking meaningless. Meaningless. Meaningless. Meaningless. The Hebrew word is hevel. It literally means breath. Vapor. Something you can't hold onto.

The only slight rainbow at the end is when he makes an observation like, well, two are better than one. Ecclesiastes 4:9-12. If one falls, the other lifts him up. If two lie down together, they keep warm. But how can one be warm alone? A threefold cord is not quickly broken. He lands on this relationship tip. That connecting with other people is really all that matters, and everything else goes back to the sand.

And I think of that. I think that's why we experience so much meaninglessness, hopelessness, despair in life right now. Because we have knowledge without wisdom.

So what the hell's wisdom? And what's the difference? Is there an app for that? Will super AI, agentic AI, magically figure out what wisdom is and what the meaning of life is? Or will it make the Terminators and murder us all? Maybe Sarah Connor was right.