Having read quite a bit lately about Big Things Happening in the World Today - lots of Substack ‘think pieces’ on AI, fertility rate decline, the ‘anti-social century’, etc. - I feel a sense of helplessness. It’s helpful, in this moment, to recall Neil Postman’s concept of the ‘information-action ratio.’ Nowadays it is so easy to consume so much information about the world in the form of endless articles about ‘Current Affairs’ that one’s time to simply get on with the business of doing the best one can to care for the immediate concerns around you, and to focus one’s energies of info-consumption on a few particular issues of concern, and to focus one’s reading overall on pleasure/leisure and on gleaning ancient wisdom - the time for _these _pursuits so easily erodes.
Really, I’m just writing myself into a renewed argument for engaging the Web via RSS reader and keeping it at that. I like to think that I don’t ‘doomscroll’ a ton, but really, mine is just a bit more sophisticated form of the same base habit: surfing the web, glutting myself with interesting information that produces no change in myself or the world besides making me feel less capable of taking concrete action in the world. Yikes!