Three Weeks In - Information Flows

We’re now three weeks into living the imperfect life. Something that’s been on my mind recently is the idea of “information flows” (my working term), and I want to share that idea with you. Feel free to add your comments and thoughts about it below. The idea is still developing, so I appreciate any and all thinking you might have on it.

What do I mean by information flows? The timescale that the information we consume operates in; the pace. 

It’s an idea that plugs into Burkeman’s recurring reminder of our natural limits—that there just isn’t enough time in the day to do everything that we could possibly want to do. At some point we have to choose what we’ll do—or the information we’ll read or think about or care about—and what we won’t. 

I first started thinking about information flows this past fall in advance of the U.S. Presidential election. In his first term, President Trump dominated the news cycle. Even if I tried to avoid it, I could easily get sucked into it. And getting sucked in often felt important and urgent and justifiable, especially if it was related to an issue I cared about. But getting sucked in might also mean I did less of the work on a thing that I cared even more about. So in terms of what I was really cared about, I might be worse off.   

With a possible second Trump presidency on the horizon at the time (of course, since confirmed), I started thinking about what I might be able to do proactively manage my information flows. I wanted to make sure I didn’t get pushed around by the news cycle. I also wanted to stay informed. What could I do to maintain my focus on the long term work that I cared about, while also being an informed member of society?

Before we get into possible answers, let me explain what I mean when I say information flows. Below are some of the information flows I’ve observed, along with examples of platforms where you might plug into that information flow.

• Hourly → social media (Bluesky)
• Daily → news (The New York Times)
• Weekly → news and essays with additional context (The Atlantic)
• Monthly → longform reporting with deep context (The New Yorker, Harper’s)
• Yearly → books on contemporary questions (The Anxious Generation)
• Multi-year, spanning generations → books on perennial human questions (Four Thousand Weeks, Meditations for Mortals)

Essentially, the idea is that information forms/platforms are designed to deliver information at certain timescales. But I want to point this out: I think we often look to these forms/platforms for information we care about without taking into account the timescale they operate in. And that's a problem.

So, as I thought about how to stay informed without having it negatively affect the work I cared about, I didn’t really have any great ideas. I tossed around the idea of changing to a brick phone (think old school Nokia; which I didn’t do), subscribing to more print magazines (which I did), and considering how I could fill my mornings with deep work and avoiding the news until later in the day (success has been spotty). 

Then, I had an aha moment. In a used book store in New York, I picked up a book by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan on the history of humanity called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are. In a passage about Charles Darwin, Sagan and Druyan describe some of the questions Darwin was grappling with throughout his career, which were similar to the questions they were grappling with in their book; questions that I spend a lot of time thinking about today—who we are, where did we come from, who can we become, what’s our purpose, and so on. We are all asking similar questions, just at different times: the 1850s, 1990s, and 2020s. 

I felt a lot of joy as well as intellectual progress, while reading the book. Here were people speaking directly to things I cared about most. It’s like we were all having a conversation. As Sagan remarked: "Books break the shackles of time.”

But why did a thirty-three year old book lead me to think about information flows?

Because I realized that I was most likely to find the conversation about human nature that I cared the most about in a book that spoke to questions that spanned generations. Books have the potential to operate in that timescale; daily news sites and social media do not. (Books, and of course behavioralscientist.org.)

The above insight seems blindingly obvious. But the fact is that there are plenty of places to get information about human nature. You can find it at all levels in the list above—on social media, in the news, long form articles, books. And to come back to the point about President Trump, you can find information about politics at all levels too.

Yet, if you’re like me, you default to information flows that are shorter—social media, daily news. They’re more accessible and salient. It’s what people are talking about and sharing. But if you asked me which flows I get the most joy and knowledge from, it’d be the opposite—long form articles and books.

From all this, there are two insights that might be useful for you. The first is that it’s probably worth asking yourself: which information flow do you want to swim in? 

Do you want to know the blow-by-blow of the latest executive order? If so, spend your time reading the daily and weekly news. But if you’re wondering about how our current political moment fits into history, then seek out long form reporting and books. 

When you answer what information flow you want to swim in, you’ll also begin to understand where to put your limited time and attention (to bring it back to Burkeman). And you’ll have identified the places that have the greatest potential to distract you from what you care about most. 

For example, if you’re curious about how our current political moment fits into history, reading social media comments about the latest news is going to be about the topic you’re hoping to learn more about, but it’s highly unlikely to deliver the information you really care about because it’s not designed to deliver it. (And if you care primarily about the specifics of today's political developments, say funding of the NIH, you won’t find what you’re looking for in a treatise on government from an ancient philosopher.) 

The second insight is that you should think about actively cultivating the information flow you want to be in. If you’re passive, you’ll get pushed around by whatever the dominant flow is—likely social media and the 24-hour news cycle. So what information can you pull into your life that will keep you in the information flow you want? I didn’t even know that Sagan had written a book on the history of humanity until I happened upon it in a used bookstore. Lesson taken: don’t wait for dumb luck to plug into the information flow you want to exist in; actively seek it out.

My hypothesis is that when there is a mismatch between the information flow we’re in and the information we seek, we feel the most defeated, unsatisfied, and alone. 

We implicitly assume that by reading more on the topic, we’ll get the information we’re after. But if you’re really motivated by learning deep insights about human behavior, reading threads on social media might leave you with the feeling that the whole endeavor is rather superficial these days. It might give you the impression that people aren’t asking the deep questions that you care about. 

And if you’re really motivated to understand this political moment in the context of history, reading the daily news will, for the most part, just deliver more and more information about the here and now. Of course to an extent it will touch on how it fits into history, but my sense is that you’ll just have loaded up on information that 1) makes you more anxious and 2) deals with issues you can do little about. Again, it might give you the impression that all that matters is what’s happening now or that others don’t think historical context is as important as you think it is. 

In both cases, the information you’re seeking exists, it’s just not in that information flow. However, when there’s a match, I think we feel energized; and the experience is generative. We come up with new ideas and dream up new possibilities. 

This is not to say one kind of flow is better than any other or that once you identify your preferred flow you should only stick to that. In fact, my sense is that you might want to swim in different flows for different topics. Maybe you want to swim in fast-paced flows for political information and slower-paced flows for behavioral science. Maybe it’s reversed. 

The point is that we can find more joy and energy by actively choosing the information flows we participate in. By doing so we can find the people who are thinking and working through the same questions as we are. There's something reassuring about having companions in this effort, even if they were working through them a century before.