This is the information age. But that does not necessarily make it the age of knowledge and wisdom. More than anything else, it is an inundation of misinformation and trivia which we then need to sift through to find a few kernels of truth.

Our candle of knowledge may be shining brighter, but the result seems to be only to show how much greater the expanse of ignorant darkness is. The more I learn, the more I realize how limited my knowledge really is.

Hello Socrates.

I have been blessed with an insatiable curiosity spanning almost everything, petering out just short of celebrity gossip and fashion. It is possible that if I was only interested in one aspect of a single narrow subject I might come to understand if fully. But then I wouldn’t be able to understand how it integrates with the rest of this wonderous creation we call the Universe.

I am doomed to be a generalist with all the related ignorance this entails, and I am much happier this way. There is always more to learn, so life will never become boring.

When I research something, an event in history for example, I learn a little about the event. At the same time I am also introduced to myriad related events and people who all have their own stories with further branches leading off of them.

As a young lad, I would play what I called the Encyclopedia Game. This involved opening an encyclopedia at random and reading an article. At the end there would be a list of “see also” articles. I would then go to one of these and proceed in this way for hours. This was in a time when the internet was nothing more than speculative fiction touched on by only a few of the more prescient Sci-Fi authors.

I was also using an encyclopedia set from the fifties, which included an article on the benefits of DDT and other such anachronistic lore. So as an added benefit I was getting a bit of a History lesson as well.

Today with the internet it is easy to get swept down the rabbit hole of linked “see alsos.” It is not unusual to spend hours jumping from link to link until one has completely forgotten their original question.

The internet is also dangerous because it is a multi-functional tool. Research is really only a minor portion of its make up. Entertainment, marketing, gossip, speculation, propaganda, and more is all funneled through the same search engines. It is no wonder people often give up in frustration before learning anything useful.