Knowing vs. Understanding: The Death of Curiosity

How often do you look back at a situation and wished you could have acted a certain way or said a certain thing, but at the time you seemed to only be able to do the opposite? Maybe you knew the facts, but because of your rashness and being in the moment, you didn’t really understand what was going on. In Sharon Begley’s article I Can’t Think! she talks about just that: the inability to make a smart decision in a situation when we are overwhelmed by information. This generation, as Begley states, has been trained to act quickly instead of accurately.  They take the most recent thing and deal with that instead of taking the facts in as a whole and figuring out which one holds the most importance. This feels much easier than having to make a decision on which task to accommodate first. This is not how it has always been, but now that we have access to information at all times we, as a community, are suffering from information fatigue.

This information fatigue is creating a new generation of people who react fast instead of precise. This is creating laziness and inaccuracies. People accept jobs, buy houses, make investments, and decide to have children based on the principle that whatever decision is faster is best. This is no way to make decisions, but this is how the new generation has “decided” to make choices. The problem, in my opinion is access. Access to information, communication, and resources at all times of the day gives a person a constant connection to anything and everything they would like to know, but will never remember because they are left with no time to think about they “why”. If a person is not sure how they feel about a decision, instead of weighing the outcomes in front of them, which are probably more important, they pull out there phone to research even more specifications to their choices that will cause even more of a decision dilemma.

I personally suffer from this, but while taking the time to think about what I am actually getting from all of this information around me, I realize that it’s not worth knowing everything that is going on all of the time. Sometimes it is better to stay curious.

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