Inside-Out Ennui

I am overwhelmed and have been for a while. Simple as that. I go about my day with a sense of saturation that is clearly at odds with my need to know and learn. Curiosity and expansion have been bred into me, inherited from my father. He was a man who had a thirst for knowledge. He was always asking questions, reading, and absorbing. I don’t claim to be my father, but I do know that feeling, that need.

When I was young and had questions, I would go to my teachers or my father or the library or the World Book (which personally gave me diagrams that I found helpful after Dad gave me “the talk”). Though questions are limitless, my resources were finite. There were only so many places I could go for answers, and those answers took time to find. So for the most part, knowledge had an easement that allowed absorption and contextualization.

But the world has moved on from then, and it has moved more quickly than I could adapt. My tendencies toward curiosity and the need to continue learning are not too different now than when I was little. Only now, I don’t need to search out a teacher or pray to the ghost of my father or find printed World Books. Now I don’t have to research how I need to research. I simply pull out my smart phone or my laptop. I search a universe of information literally at my fingertips.

Sometimes I don’t even have to search. Technology has provided me with smart services that alert me on things I didn’t even know I had questions about. Recently, I received an email from a technical library service I subscribe to and was given a heads up about a doctoral thesis entitled

 The Production of Urban Public Space: A Lefebvrian Analysis of Castlefield, Manchester by Michael Edema Leary. Not my field of knowledge or interest, but the term “A Lefebyrian Analysis” set its hooks into my curiosity. In no time, I had found and order and am reading The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre. My already bursting schedule now has the addition of a tome on the reconciliation of mental space and real space (the philosophical and the geometric).

I am inundated with information. I find it online, on 24 hours news channels. I am drowned by the tidal wave that tumbles me airless in the turbulent water of information and misinformation. Because as it turns out, the difficulty of looking for information has been greatly simplified while the ability to trust it at times has been greatly diminished.

There is no going back, though. Pandora has seen fit that once opened, her box cannot be closed. I hope that the youth our species can adapt and become as efficient at mining what’s out there as we once were with our encyclopedias and teachers. For me I can’t take it, but I can’t let it go. I remain overwhelmed, and overstimulated. I remain dealing with the creeping paralysis to creativity that comes from not knowing how to stop searching and how to start writing.