Overcoming Information Overload
Wee lab rats, we can get off the endless wheel
Hello friends. Greetings from the endless summer of the hypernormal.
What an amazing experience I had talking to former NPR colleague Yowei Shaw for her awesome Proxy podcast, billed as “emotional investigative journalism”! We did a deep dive on "how to cope with now". It was honestly so life affirming to hear that the work I’m doing here on The Golden Hour was helpful for someone out there. Check out the whole podcast.
So many beautiful, egregious, mundane things are happening, and I have a browser tab open for each of them. By the end of each day it leaves me feeling numbed out, dissociated, and above all, overinformed.
Scholars in different disciplines use different names for this situation: “flood of information,” “information surplus,” “information avalanche,” “input overload,” “data trash,” “data smog,” “information burden,” “data explosion,” “technostress.” In other words, the concept of information overload is itself overloaded.
According to a data company called Domo, every minute of every day in 2024, 251 million emails were sent, Netflix subscribers around the world streamed 362,962 hours of entertainment, blah blah blah you’ve seen 7.45 million of these infographics, 1.04 million messages were sent on Slack, …
I talked to a researcher this week named Julian Sienkiewicz. He is part of an international, interdisciplinary project called OMINO— Overcoming Multilevel Information Overload.
As a case in point of what we’re all up against, he wrote to me: “It’s a miracle that your email went past the spam filter! I’m flooded with ca. 10 offers a day from predatory journals containing such phrases “request”, “book”, “article”. It’s the very type of overload in science lately that makes us miss important information frequently.” (Predatory journals are scams trying to extract money from academics by offering fraudulent publication).
He told me after two years, the OMINO team still hasn’t arrived at a good measurement or even a precise definition of information overload.
“If you’d asked me two years ago, I would have been more optimistic, but it’s very, very tricky.”
Calling much of this stuff “information” is kind, of course. It’s porn, lies, rage bait, AI, PR, nonsense. Our names express our revulsion–“data smog,” “data trash,” spam, brainrot, slop.
The polycrisis produces data smog about real smog, as well as data smog that obscures the real smog. And the mercenary logic of both is the exact same: the smog and the data smog are both negative externalities produced by for-profit companies that don’t care if they poison the commons, as long as they make a buck.
Sienkiewicz and his colleagues published a letter in Nature Human Behavior last year comparing the pollution of the information environment to the pollution of the natural environment.
Infopollution, they argue, is not just a personal problem. It can compromise the working of organizations, of science as an international enterprise, of nations. Hence—multilevel information overload.
But Sienkiewicz acknowledged to me that the idea of regulating information is a political nonstarter almost everywhere. Free societies protect free speech, while regimes like Trump’s protect and celebrate liars.
A quick word about lies : they happen to be particularly greedy occupiers of our mental space, even more so than true facts or truthy factoids.
Human working memory is limited to between five and nine units of information.
Even after a piece of misinformation is debunked, it leaves a trace, called CIE – the continued influence effect. You, my dear reader, surely know vaccines don’t cause autism, but you still retain a certain association of vaccines with autism.
The continued influence effect explains why the news feels particularly exhausting lately.
Every single day there are new headlines, press conferences, interviews full of lies.
A simple lie: TRUMP SENDS TROOPS FOR CRIME CRACKDOWN IN WASHINGTON, DC
The complicated truth: TRUMP SENDS TROOPS FOR CRIME crime is going down actually CRACKDOWN an illegal escalation of fascism IN WASHINGTON, DC
You, who cares about truth, are left holding onto the truth and the ghost of the lies at the same time. These are our brains rn:
Though information overload is hard to measure, the subjective effect is clear. Taking in too much information—or “information”—makes you tired. It makes you make worse decisions, or avoid making decisions. It makes you miss important messages in the noise.
Information overload makes it more likely that we will share false information. In turn, seeing fake news fosters “more inefficacy, alienation, and cynicism.”
This should be the part of the essay where I tell you to replenish your attention, deprive yourself of stimulation, calm your mind, reclaim your focus and your time.
Practice mindfulness meditation.
Limit your news reading to just 10 minutes a day, or just my weekly news roundup.
Take a walk without your phone. Leave it in another room when you go to sleep.
Wear earplugs. Sleep with an eyeshade. Close the curtains.
All great ideas! And yet —I’m struck by the fact that on some level we are seeking out this overload. Many of us (me, it me) go about our everyday tasks with a TV show or podcast in the background, layering every second of our waking hours with a palimpsest of blab. More than four out of five people (yes, it also me) thumb our phones while watching television.
And you know what? I was on a trip with my family last week, and away from the news from a couple of days, and...it sucked coming back to it! It all hit me over the head with a painful freshness, just how bad things are, just how cruel and incompetent our leaders right now are. I prefer to stay on the drip, drip, drip of the daily badness, it’s actually less painful that way.
We are beings with agency. If we are seeking out all this information we must be trying to fulfill some need, right?
The “rat park” concept of addiction refers to some famous studies that suggested that given ample company, and toys and exercise gear like balls and wheels, rats are less likely to develop addictions to cocaine or morphine, even when the drugs are freely available.
So maybe instead of moralizing or beating ourselves up about chronic info-overload, or putting ourselves on an information diet, it’s more thinking about where we can intentionally enrich our environment, adding in more experiences that meet our needs for connection, inspiration, novelty, curiosity fulfillment, soothing, and fun.
Have sex with someone you love (masturbation counts!).
Get two different flavors of ice cream. Try something new. Close your eyes while eating.
Do a DBT tip like plunging your face into ice water.
Do a deep dive on something that’s off the news but that you find really fascinating. For me, recently, it’s been Mazatec psilocybin shaman Maria Sabina. I’m making my way through the famous biography of her in Spanish : “La sabia de los hongos.” It has the grooviest cover:
Does a “rat park” approach sound more appealing to you than an info-diet? Let me know in the comments.
Real Youth Voices
I want to let you know about this awesome project I love—Youth Comm provides teens a space, a platform, and professional editors to tell deep, thoughtful stories about their lives and communities. The writers are predominantly youth of color, and include immigrants and youth in foster care.
Their stories appear in two digital magazines, and in social and emotional curricula and professional development programs. YC has been publishing true teen stories since 1980.
I grew up in a strict Muslim family in Central Africa. At 11 or 12 years old, I realized I was attracted to girls. But in my surroundings, there was no word for a girl who wanted to be with a girl. No books. No movies. No conversations.
I thought I was sick, possessed, or just crazy. I was ashamed. So I stayed silent.
The content is…a lot. It reminds me of danah boyd’s context collapse but 2025. And literally, I was thinking of (mumble mumble)’s idea of palimpsestal time right when the word was used. Serendipitous/everything is smashing together!
So I appreciate the point about making room for chosen content (off screens) in addition to what we’re algorithmically fed. There’s less time to doomscroll if reading about shrooms and shamans.
I'm thinking that maybe also, join a local organization and put some time and effort into it. It could be a religious organization or it could be something like Rotary. My personal experiment is to see if putting time into Rotary is a net positive for my soul.
So far it's been great.