The value of strategic ignorance

You wake up, get ready for your day, and like a good citizen, get on the BBC.

After getting up to date on World Affairs, you get on Tiktok.

An hour later you regain consciousness, feeling joyful, grateful, and full of faith in humanity.

Or not.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

HERBERT SIMON, recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”

Your attention is your greatest asset. Reclaim it.

How can you navigate the 24/7 onslaught of information you’re subject to in modern life?

You’ll be encourage and often pressured to keep up to date with current events. You will be fed narrative after narrative in an attempt to influence your emotional state and worldview. I’ve had many conversations with friends and acquaintances that believe it’s important to consume the news. But who does it actually serve?

Every organisation, no matter how virtuous or corrupt, is fighting a war for your attention.

In his book “The 4-Hour Workweek”, Tim Ferris talks about the importance of ‘selective ignorance’ and ‘cultivating your information diet’.

In short:

  • Information is only useful if it can be applied. Information that cannot be immediately applied to something important is a distraction. This is what you need to limit.
  • “Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.”

Protect your attention ruthlessly. Mindful consumption of information is just as important as mindful consumption of food.

It’s normal, even expected, for people to over-consume information – often passively. They are fed information through news channels and papers, and now social media.

That’s the goal. The passive consumption of an infinite hose information the objective for social media companies. They’ve invested billions of dollars into both the design of their platforms and the content they serve you.

The development of the continuous scroll feed, combined with the uncanny relevance of the content they serve you, is designed specifically to steal your attention. Their platforms are designed to pull you into a flow state so that you don’t realise how much time has passed.

As someone who regularly gets sucked in by the algorithm and then spawns back into reality an hour later wondering why I’m watching a guy yell at himself while he does leg extensions, I am no stranger to this.

What does it cost?

It cost more than time. It cost attention. This is far harder measure than time, but much more valuable. Your attention determines the quality of your time. Your attention is what makes you feel alive and present. It is what your loved ones need from you. It is what your work needs from you. It is precisely what is stolen from you through billions of dollars of investment in data science and behavioural research.

I’m not saying there isn’t a way to use it healthily nor do I think using social media in moderation is unhealthy. But I seem to be incapable of doing that.

Now for the news.

You may feel you have an obligation to keep up to date with everything that’s going on in the world. You don’t. It would be exhausting to care about everything the media puts on your plate. You have to choose what you care about.

There are some terrible things going on in the world. I can see why it would seem insensitive to not know and “care“ about these events. So I want to explore that further.

What does it mean to care?

it seems like all the definitions of care involve one of two things:

  • Action
  • Emotional attachment

So the question is: Are you going to take action? Or are you going to become emotionally attached to the situation?

Our attention and energy is a limited resource. By choosing to care about all the terrible things going on in the world, you are deciding not to care about something else. So the question is: Is this the most important thing you can dedicate your time and attention to?

You might say that if everyone only consumed information that was relevant to their goals, humanity would be shallow. But that’s only true if people have shallow goals. If your goal is to educate people about the issues you care about, then consuming about those issues is relevant to your goal.

To paraphrase Mark Manson, you cannot care about everything.

“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”

Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Limiting your passive consumption and ignoring information that’s irrelevant, unimportant, or inactionable, can go a long way. If you eat every bit of food you come across at a buffet you won’t have room for the good stuff.

You don’t have to live with your head in the sand, you can get a pretty good idea of anything important just by paying attention as you go about your day to day life. Scan headlines and occasionally listen when people are talking and you probably won’t miss anything important.

In my experience, strategic ignorance has worked pretty well. All I’ve observed so far is a decreased sense of dread, a greater sense of peace, and more gratitude.

Related Posts:

Scroll to Top