An Unwise Age

Our world has more and more information, but less and less wisdom. More data; less clarity. More stimulation; less synthesis. More distraction; less stillness. More pontificating; less pondering. More opinion; less research. More speaking; less listening. More to look at; less to see. More amusements; less joy. There is more, but we are less. And we all feel it.
 
Our eyes are strained, brains overstimulated, and souls weary. We’re living in an epistemological crisis. It’s hard to know if anything can be reliably known. We are resigned to a new normal where the choice seems to be: trust everything or trust nothing. Or maybe the choice is: trust nothing or trust only in yourself—a seemingly logical strategy, but one that sadly only inflames our epistemological sickness.
 
Generation Z, or iGen as psychologist Jean Twenge has dubbed them, are living their lives through phones. And they are not happier. With lives characterized by ever-present screen time, texting, and social media, iGen has subsequently been defined by rising rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, sleeplessness, and suicidal ideation.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

The Devil Delights

It’s easy to imagine the devil delighting in all this: angry tribalism, addictive triviality, amusing ourselves to death. As humans become more stressed, numbed, disoriented, distracted, and paralyzed by the impenetrable glut of information, chaos reigns. As chaos reigns, sin thrives.

It’s interesting that the fall of man in Genesis 3 came about because of temptations of knowledge: fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In our age too, the lure of infinite, godlike knowledge wreaks havoc. I sometimes ponder that the logo on my iPhone—a device that approximates godlike knowledge if ever there was one—is an apple with a bite mark. A nod to Eve’s original sin? An ode to humanity’s insatiable hunger for infinite knowledge? Perhaps. But just as for Adam and Eve in Eden, so it is for us: the desire to know everything only leads to grief.
 
Good reporting takes time. Sources must be verified. The fuller picture of out-of-context quotes, images, and videos must be sought. But the “fortune favors the fast” nature of journalism today often skips these essential steps. Further, we consumers are often eager to share things on the spot. Our quick-draw posture on social media is often “post first, think later” (if we think at all). This is disastrous—not only because it makes us easy to manipulate, but also because it erodes our credibility and can do great harm to others.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

A Healthier Information Dietary

The world needs wisdom desperately, truth that is unshakable and foundations that are solid. Only Christianity provides this sort of wisdom, and it’s exactly the medicine our ailing culture needs. In order to bring the light of Christian wisdom to the darkness of our unwise age, however, Christians must recover habits of wisdom in their own lives. We need a diet built around knowledge intake that actually cultivates wisdom. We need for our mental and spiritual health what the Food Pyramid was for our physical health: guidance for what to eat and what not to eat and in what proportions, so we can become more healthy and strong.
 
From cradle to grave, we are formed by others. Contrary to what a “look within” world would suggest, the world outside our heads defines our existence in ways we are foolish to ignore. Rather than seeing this as oppressive, or simply pretending (foolishly) this isn’t the case, we should accept this situation as a gift: truth comes, in large part, from outside ourselves. We can choose the sources of where we look for truth. We can choose how we synthesize truth and apply it as wisdom in everyday circumstances. But we don’t get to choose whether or not something is true. We don’t invent truth. We don’t determine it. We search it out and accept it with gratitude, even when it’s at odds with our feelings or preferences.
 
One of the most valuable areas of biblical wisdom we need for our day is the taming of the tongue. Before we sound off online, we should remember proverbs like:

“Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin” (Prov. 13:3).

“Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (Prov. 14:29).

“Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble” (Prov. 21:23).

 
Or there is James 1:19—a verse that, if heeded, would prevent all manner of grief in today’s world (but would also probably put social media out of business): “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” The problem, of course, is that today’s media economy is fueled by “quick to speak” rants, mobs, and pile-ons that create traffic spikes and trending topics. To resist this temptation is one of the most challenging yet subversive things a wisdom-seeking Christian can do.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Sickness of Information Gluttony

Today’s frenetic information landscape is making our brains busier than ever: the information triage that our over-burdened brains must constantly perform naturally drains huge amounts of energy. Constant multitasking also drains energy… notes neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, overstimulates and stresses our brains:
 

Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviour.

 In addition to causing cognitive dizziness, this indistinguishable array of information erodes our ability to distinguish between the trivial and the truly important. Over time we come to value information more for its spectacle—infotainment—than for the complex realities it signifies. Our news feeds are the amusement parks, penny arcades, and vaudeville stages of the digital era.
 
Ironically, as much as the information age (and its “global village”) promises to broaden our horizons and create healthy, integrated, well-informed global citizens, in reality it has had the opposite effect. The hyper-connection and over-awareness of a space-conquered world renders us fragmented and disconnected from place—the local contexts where we can know and be known and effect change to the greatest degree.
 
After the telegraph, Postman argues, “Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right to reply.” Social media, of course, gives us permission to “reply”—but to what end? We may have a sense that our participation is meaningful action, that it is doing something, but more often than not we are only adding to the noise, getting needlessly angry, and contributing more irrelevant information to our already overloaded, exhausted brains.
 
Indeed, the stress of having to actively sift through viewing options tends to make us more passive, with little capacity for what Tony Reinke calls “spectacle resistance”: “Our lazy eyes and incurious gaze are happily fed by the spectacle makers. We no longer seek out new spectacles; new spectacles seek us out.”

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Three Habits Making Us Sick

We must examine our daily diet of knowledge intake. It can be nutritious, making us wise and shrewd, more able to ward off intellectual infections and spiritual afflictions. But it can also be toxic, making us unwise and more susceptible to the lies and snares of our age.
 
1. Eating Too Much
In the competitive landscape of the digital age, the “food” of information is not getting more nutritious; it’s veering in the direction of junk food. Doritos and Skittles will always get more clicks than spinach. And so we walk down the buffet line of social media snacks and online junk food, daily gorging ourselves to the point of gluttony. Unsurprisingly, it is making us sick.
 
The “limitless space” nature of online media has also created a situation where “news” channels must find content to fill 24 hours a day, seven days a week, resulting in a diminishment of what qualifies as “newsworthy” (e.g., filling an hour with live car chases). On the Web, not only is there the expectation of daily, fresh, “breaking news” content, but there is fierce competition for clicks. Desperate to stand out, websites are motivated to use incendiary headlines and other tricks to collect coveted clicks by any means necessary. The result is content that is often rushed (a hot take on yesterday’s controversy), random, reckless, or even distorted to spark short-term controversy rather than long-term wisdom.
 
2. Eating Too Fast
The Internet is a medium of now. Its memory is short; its shape ever changing. To navigate life online is to always be playing catch up: reading the article everyone is sharing on Facebook, following someone’s Instagram story before it disappears.
 
Scholars have found that the “junk food” nature of information intake online is rewiring our brains, such that our cognitive abilities to think carefully and critically are being eroded. “In a culture that rewards immediacy, ease, and efficiency,” writes literacy advocate Maryanne Wolf, “the demanding time and effort involved in developing all the aspects of critical thought make it an increasingly embattled entity.”
Over time our skepticism about all sources leads us to turn inward, trusting only in ourselves—which brings us to our third major bad dietary habit.
 
3. Eating Only What Tastes Good to Me
We might be tempted to consume only material we like and have a taste for, but that will leave us sickly. Sadly, this is exactly what many of us do in today’s hyper-individualistic, choose-your-own-adventure world.
 
First, when everything revolves around you and your tastes, it’s only going to be awesome if you know exactly what’s good for you. And we usually don’t… The second problem is that when every individual is living a totally unique, customized, perfectly curated “i” life, it is harder to find commonality with others. We start losing the ability to be empathetic, unable to connect with people because their experience of the world—the news they consume, their social media feeds, and so on—is different from ours in ways we can’t even know. We are all living in our own self-made media bubbles, and no two are the same. Part of the reason society is increasingly divisive is that we can’t have productive conversations when everyone comes to it with their own set of “facts,” “experts,” and background biases, having been shaped by an information diet completely different from anyone else’s. And when we can’t relate to others, we retreat further into our individualistic, self-referential bubbles, which is not an environment where wisdom can grow.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Learning How to Learn

In essence people have two fundamentally different modes of thinking: focused and diffuse. 
 
Focused Mode
- has tight spacing for the rubber bumpers, which seems to, in some sense help keep your thoughts concentrated. 
- is centered on the prefrontal cortex and it often seems to involve thinking about things you are somewhat familiar with. 
- stepping along the somewhat familiar pathways 
 
Diffuse Mode
- has more widely spaced bumpers that allow for more broad ranging ways of thinking. 
- to solve or figure out something new
 
When we find ourselves stuck on a problem, or even if we're unsure of a situation, the course of living our daily life. It's often a good idea once you've focused directly on the situation. To let things settle back and take a bit more time. That way more neural processing can take place, often below conscious awareness in the diffuse mode. The thing is it often takes time for neural processing to take place, and time, as well, to build the new neural structures that allow us to learn something new. 
 
It's through practice and repetition that we can help enhance and strengthen the neural structures we're building as we're learning something new. Practice and repetition is particularly important for more abstract topics. 

Working Memory vs Long Term Memory

Memory of course is an important aspect of learning. There are four slots in our working memory. Things can fall out of those slots unless we keep repeating them to hold them in mind. In that sense working memory is like a not very good blackboard. 

Long term memory, on the other hand, is like a storage warehouse. If you practiced and repeated something well enough to get it into long-term memory, you can usually call it up later if you need, although you may need an occasional bit of repetition to freshen the memory up. 

It's never a good idea to cram your learning by repeating things many times all in one day. Because that's like trying to build muscle by lifting weights all in one day there's no time for solid structures to grow. 

- Barbara Oakley, Learning How to Learn, by Deep Teaching Solutions.

Future-focused Time Management

One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit. Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase.
 
This is also the kernel of truth in the cliché that people in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life—which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the present. Mexico, for example, has often outranked the United States in global indices of happiness. Hence the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends.
 
Appalled at the fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, then retire early. “And what would I do then?” the fisherman asks. “Ah, well, then,” the businessman replies, “you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021