There was a time when knowledge felt like a gift. People traveled for days to hear a single story, read a rare book, or meet someone who carried wisdom from another corner of the world. Information was slow, precious, and carried a sense of wonder.
Today, I can wake up and in the first five minutes of the day, I can know what is happening in SF, Tokyo, and Paris. I can see someone’s wedding in Paris, someone’s heartbreak in Delhi, and a war in another country all at once. I can learn about black holes, stock markets, AI breakthroughs, and conspiracy theories before breakfast. Knowledge has exploded around us like a flood, and sometimes it feels less like a gift and more like a weight.
It is strange because we thought more information would make us wiser. Instead, I sometimes feel it makes me restless. There is too much to process, too much to hold in one mind. The internet has removed the boundaries of distance, but it has also removed the boundaries inside my head. There is no filter anymore between what matters and what does not. Everything arrives at the same speed, on the same screen, demanding the same attention.
And then there is AI. A machine that can answer almost anything, summarize entire books in seconds, predict trends, write code, even write essays like this. It makes me wonder: if everything can be known so easily, if answers come before the questions even form in my mind, what happens to curiosity? What happens to the quiet joy of not knowing something, of learning slowly, of discovery taking its own time?
Sometimes I feel this constant knowing pulls me in too many directions. It makes me aware of every crisis, every opportunity, every opinion, every possibility. My mind becomes like a browser with a hundred tabs open, none of them fully read.
Maybe wisdom was never about knowing everything. Maybe it was about knowing what to leave out, what to unlearn, what to protect inside your mind so it does not drown in noise.
The world will keep giving us more data, more facts, more answers. But I think the real art now is learning how to hold less. How to let some things remain unknown. How to live with mystery again. Because sometimes, too much knowing leaves no room for wonder. And without wonder, life feels thin no matter how much information we carry.
