Throughout the years, I collected hundreds of books and thousands of articles—anything that seemed insightful or held the promise of insight. I’ve always been a voracious knowledge seeker — admittedly not a very discerning one — motivated by a curiosity that I find healthy, but sometimes irritating to others. I tinkered with systems because I wanted to know the inner workings of things — from the intercom system inside our old hours, to the Commodore VIC 20 I was given as my first computer in 1990 (free and obsolete by then) to the soul.
But with the explosion of content that followed in the last couple of decades, and now the ease with which we can produce it, I, like many others find myself overloaded with the number of books and articles that I need to add to my physical and virtual library because they seem to be interesting. As I read (and now listen on drives because there’s so much material to cover) I find, at best, interesting bits here and there. The golden nuggets of insight I’ve always sought are now rarer to come by. It is now like looking for a needle in a haystack — a needle one that you will use to stitch together other insightful pieces that you have collected along the way.
Isn’t it ironic, then, that it is harder, not easier, to find in this vast unfathomable pool of data those things that you would consider insightful to what Hannah Arendt would call the life of the mind?
Sure, I now have access to texts and research that would not have been as immediately possible 20 years ago. However, my curiosity was not nourished by being exposed to countless pieces of information. Whatever ingredient nourished it was plentiful even before the proliferation of data on the Internet. My theory is this: just like our fingerprints, the way we arrange ideas and information in our minds is unique. From this unique tapestry of ideas are born others. The answer is not simply more data; it is time to weave the data we do have into tapestries of the mind. That is where I’d look for the insights.
Metagnostic 