Too Much

One thing you notice about the past is that it was a lot smarter. People like Gibbons and Newton were making quantum leaps in human knowledge doing little more than just thinking about it very hard. I used to marvel at this. The Fall of Rome researched without the Internet?! Inconceivable! After the experience on the AT, however, and after a summary period of being a wart on the bum of my old life, I've determined that the surfeit of knowledge, like the surfeit of jalapeno poppers, is a bad thing.

Like jalapeno poppers, knowledge in this modern world is everywhere, sticks to your guts, and smells delicious. If you do not know something, you can know it in moments by opening your friendly google page and entering "wikipedia whatever". Then you know it. This, however, cuts out the most important part of learning: pretending to know something you don't. I don't know how many new avenues of thought I've arrived at by pretending to know things I don't. I imagine that the sum of Mankind would be a lot smaller if it weren't for people pretending to know things that they don't in fact know. To be honest, this makes a sort of sense. The human brain's memory storage mechanisms are relatively weak compared to its ability to hook things together. We don't remember things so well, but we synthesize like nobody's business.

When we get away from civilization, Google, and Wikipedia, we are forced to actually think about the knowledge in our head- and make up explanations for those things we can't look up instantly. Sometimes those explanations are good ones. I'm pretty sure we'd still be exploring the underpinnings of the Ether if Wikipedia and CNN had been around in 1912. Unfortunately, like jalapeno poppers, this pure distillate of knowledge in the 21st century is impossible to remove yourself from. It's how we communicate and how we live, as isolated nodes in an enourmous hive-mind we call "Western Civilization". You just can't stop eating the damn things.

Unfortunately, sucking knowledge and jalapeno poppers will get you to only one place: morbid obesity. And on that note, I'm going for a walk. A stroll, rather.