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summary:short videos that have become the background music of society consume your time and brain in a way that makes you "happy", which makes your body collapse and paralyzes your self-control. you can't stop watching at all, and you become a "human battery" consumed by superficial entertainment. the "initiative" of finding and searching is very important. a scholar defines depression as "the loss of initiative". without initiative, the mind is dominated by "all kinds of powerlessness". the same is true for information. without the ability to proactively find, obtain, and reflect critically, you will fall into a serious state of information depression and anxiety during the feeding. critical thinking contains a profound initiative.

i was talking to a few friends about "information overload" and we were all shocked by a habit we usually don't realize but that easily kills our time:i have collected a lot of long articles but seldom read them. i was reading an article but it was easy to jump to other information with the link. i picked up my phone to do something and was quickly attracted by the information and finally forgot what i was doing. i watched videos before going to bed and an hour or two passed by. i had a judgment on something, but i lost my opinion after reading too much information. data hoarding far exceeds the information our brain can process, making us constantly shift our focus and look for diverse and stimulating information, which seriously damages our ability to think and takes away the "deep attention" that supports our patience and long-term focus.we are information giants, but we may become knowledge dwarfs!

a while ago, a campus media interviewed me and asked me to give some advice to college freshmen. i specifically mentioned one point:don’t let bad habits eat up your time. don’t take the “freedom and relaxation” of freshman year as a “reward for the hard work of the previous ten years”, which will eventually turn your precious time into “waste time”. don’t turn on your phone or computer during class, make more eye contact with the teacher, don’t look at your phone before going to bed or when you wake up, always carry a book with you, and cultivate concentration and self-discipline in reading.go to the library and sit on the bench to read classics. don't chase hot topics, and don't think you're out of date if you don't go online for a few days. if you don't have this kind of self-discipline and lack the initiative to seek knowledge, you will easily be dominated by the endless flow of information on your phone that caters to your weaknesses, deceiving your brain and making you "happy" to the point of being unable to stop, killing your time, and leaving you empty.

technology tames people's brains. even nobel prize winner mo yan, who has strong self-discipline, is often defeated by the magic of algorithms. in an interview, he reflected:every time i finish watching a short video, i criticize myself for wasting an hour on content that is mostly not in-depth. taking the initiative to open a book is an effective way to help us resist impetuousness and relieve anxiety.

speaking of anxiety, i remember what philosophy professor liu qing mentioned in an interview: "young people's existential anxiety is that they like to be alone but are obsessed with information." this hits the pain point of anxiety for many young people today. he said: young people like to be alone, but are also keen on obtaining information and worrying about being out of date. this is a sign of existential anxiety. the information cocoon provides a false solution for people in a confused era. this is caused by algorithms.it feeds you the same things you like, one after another, giving you a certain stability, but this comes at the cost of the world's tribalization. we must jump out of the obsession with homogeneous information and entertainment hunting, actively search and explore, and step out of the cocoon of solitude, so that we can gain new knowledge.

yes, this kind of "initiative" is very important, a scholardepression is defined as "loss of initiative". without initiative, the mind is dominated by "all kinds of overwhelming powerlessness". the same is true for information. without the initiative to find, obtain, and reflect critically, one will fall into a serious state of information depression and anxiety during the process of feeding. critical thinking contains a profound initiative.

yes, our attention is being devoured by the flood of information. david weinberg mentioned a scary number in "the edge of knowledge": researchers say that in 2008 alone, americans consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information. how much is a zettabyte? it is equal to one thousand to the seventh power of bytes. what is one thousand to the seventh power? that is 10 to the 21st power of bytes, or one billion gigabytes multiplied by 1000. the electronic version of "war and peace" takes up 2mb of space on a kindle, and one zettabyte is equivalent to 5× "10 to the 14th power" copies of "war and peace". - this was the situation in 2008. in china, where information technology is highly developed and self-media is highly active, this number may be even more incredible. after understanding "zettabytes" and calculating the average amount of information consumed by each person every day, you will know where our precious time has gone. a lot of your mobile phone power and life power are consumed in this way.

it is not you who is consuming information, but the information that is consuming you, attracting your attention, killing your time, occupying your memory, and damaging your thinking ability.the biggest difference between information and knowledge is that knowledge is something that nourishes you and makes you more and more knowledgeable, while information is something that consumes you. your time and attention are ultimately converted into traffic harvested by others. you gain nothing but information obesity. you use very simple entertainment to kill boredom, but you are still bored afterwards.the acquisition of knowledge can broaden your horizons and support your output, while highly homogenized and fragmented information makes people lose the ability to make independent judgments. what is knowledge? knowledge itself is the extraction, screening and filtering of information. it is a complex and professional filtering system for information. it obtains knowledge by subtracting information, so that we can avoid useless information occupying our memory.

in 1934, the poet eliot asked three soul-searching questions in a poem titled "rocks": where is the life we ​​have lost in survival? where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? where is the knowledge we have lost in information? the last question in particular directly hits the soft spot of modern people trapped in the cocoon of information overload. how can we save people from the ocean of information, information garbage, and analysis paralysis, and get rid of the existential anxiety of information obesity but knowledge poverty?

first, we need to take the initiative to search, rather than getting used to being pushed, fed, and harvested.i remember a lecture in which a student asked a question during the exchange session: many social platforms are too entertaining nowadays, full of celebrity gossip, this one walking the dog, that one holding hands, this one cheating, that one falling in love. what should we do in the face of this information environment? i asked her three questions in return: first, why do i rarely see this kind of information on my social media homepage? second, in fact, online information is very diverse, with a lot of serious news and professional content. have you tried to actively obtain it yourself instead of waiting to be fed? third, you are not only an information consumer, but also a content producer. what efforts have you made to change the bad information environment you criticize? how many serious comments have you written?

classic books not only provide content, but also should encourage a "leaning forward" attitude (rather than a lying back attitude waiting to be fed), actively searching and exploring in the library, and discovering first-class authors and first-class knowledge.

second, we need to get rid of our dependence on entertainment devices and improve our tolerance for boredom in order to acquire new knowledge.in a previous article, i talked about the generation of people living in a consumerist and entertainment environment, who have been spoiled by "excitement" and are increasingly losing the ability to endure boredom and learn in boredom. people love the sensory stimulation of hot topics, jokes, golden sentences, laughs, vividness, and baggage. they are used to being fed with entertainment information that consumes their own time. their learning senses have become dull and they cannot enter the realm of deep learning beyond the threshold of boredom. short videos that have become the background sound of society are eating up your time and brain in a way that makes you "happy", making your body collapse into a ball, and paralyzing your self-control, so that you can't stop at all. strong self-discipline is the ability to resist those "cheap pleasures".

mcluhan once predicted that whatever aspects of human ability are extended by tools, those aspects of human ability will inevitably become numb.this is an embarrassing reality: media not only extends human limbs, but is also a form of "amputation."it is said that there was controversy over whether london taxis should be equipped with gps systems. later, an experiment was conducted and the results showed that drivers equipped with gps systems had a sharp decline in their spatial memory of london. the same is true for learning and seeking knowledge. when people become addicted to entertainment and information devices, their organs of seeking knowledge gradually degenerate.

third, stay connected with high-quality professional content producers and knowledge ecosystems.cromwell said that a man can never climb higher than what he does not know. in this media environment where information is overflowing, high-quality content is still a scarce commodity. what kind of content we are "influenced" by, what kind of books we read, and what kind of knowledge we obtain determine our vision. why are some corners rarely reached, but can be seen by many people? this knowledge declaration of a media is very contagious: those who first walked into the mountains let more people walk into the mountains; those who "revive" traditions let more people "re-recognize" traditions; those who first arrive in the distance let more people "curious" about the distance. the world is so big, and those who discover it first can let more people see it. the production and dissemination of knowledge is the endless flow of "pioneers" and "followers".

man is not a "human battery" to be consumed by electronic media, but a reed of thought, actively seeking and absorbing the sunshine and rain with the power of life.