Don’t Inform Me

This is a rant.

This is a rant of a young man angry at the age he lives in. In this anger, there is not harshness; rather it is an anger of understanding. An understanding of the age that I live in. And the age that I live in is the age of information. Information blasts our eardrums, stimulates our pupils, and invades our brains each second of our days. Dazed, we take in all we can from each screen presented to us: the TVs and the PCs, the phones and the pads, the billboards and the ads, the Googles and Wikipedias, the news and the media, and every other square inch of space that is left for us to perceive is taken up with information meant for us to receive. We receive so much that our minds malfunction if we even attempt to think of each little byte of data programmed into our systems. To systematically receive only what one will actually use is a lost art form.

Formidable heroes of our times strive to teach us, but we hear so little in our times. Time. How much we’ve been given, yet how little we’ve taken. So taking in all of this, we now see: we are confined by our expanse. But let us not expand too deeply into metaphors and figurativeness lest we forget our original resentment: the age of information. Inform me again why I need to know all of this? All of this self-help and personal development, this threat to my health or my previously unknown impediment. Do not impede on my mind’s ability to think. “But I thought information was a good thing; I drink eight cups a day to keep the doctor away.” But away from our doctors, our teachers, our leaders, our parents, our friends is away from ourselves. Selfishly, we keep our minds locked away by leaving them wide open. Open to take in all we can, but there is a problem that arises when a certain soul starts searching to understand. Under the mountains of information that fall upon us, there is a valley hidden with a path to the top; it is on this path I wish to stand. I wish to fall low on the ground away from the storage of clouds which rain down indiscriminate of which drops fall where. Wherever can we be in this maze of over-standing.

Understanding this, what am I talking about?! I told you this was a rant.

But allow me to be more blunt now that I hope I’ve lost you. You see, we have lost the experience that builds our character. We follow caricatures of who we want to be through tubes created by you and me. We read blah-blah blogs and rush to Eman only when there is a nametag in it for me. Mere souvenirs we carry of places we’ve been like postcards of knowledge; yet we neglect to look at the map we’ve navigated from. From one to the next, if a cartographer could map the trips we’ve made, we’d faint at the flight fare we’ve paid as the lines create a large maze instead of a single path we can follow without our pencil being raised. So raise your ranks by taking a staycation and look to your own zip code and find that building.

That building with people who choose to build people, though the carpet may be greener at another far away place. Place yourself on a map that requires no travel. Travel with an itinerary through yourself and find that not all the information is relevant right now. Now, the fascination with the random should be relegated; observe how each word connects to the next until we find the finale.

Finally, to put this in simpler terms:

Stop ranting. Go read a good book.