Information is death

You've heard the following before:

1. "We live in the Information Age"
2. "Information is power"
3. "There's too much information"
4. "Information overload is a major problem"

What you might not have heard is:

INFORMATION IS DEATH

This statement is true because:

To be useful, information first has to be "consumed" by the human mind, which means that you always lose precious time (i.e. life) when you absorb information. Therefore, the more information you read or absorb every day, the more life you lose. Reading, watching TV, studying, etc. are all comsumption activities, where as you consume information, INFORMATION CONSUMES YOUR LIFE.

We often don't realize this fact (that information kills your life one minute at a time) because "consuming information" indiscriminately has become a habit that we somehow blindly accept without challenging its basic premise.

Indeed, most people will agree that "information is good, that it's better to be informed about what is going on." Yet very few people can tell you what they actually DID with the information they got from the (professional, competent and quite friendly) TV news anchor yesterday evening.

In other words, every day, millions of people spend about 30 minutes getting information from the six o'clock news program without doing anything with it.

That is, every day, millions of people have their minds filled with useless information.

To understand why this is alarming, imagine that every day, at precisely six o'clock, someone rings your door bell. You open the door and ask politely: "Yes, can I help you?"

The man in front of you says: "We're here to bring in some sensational furniture. But you can't do anything with it. It's just there for you to look at it and perhaps discuss it with coworkers around the watercooler. It's just there to occupy the space in your living room. We'll come back every day, at precisely six o'clock. We'll do this for the next 20 years."

Intrigued, you ask the man: "But why would I let you enter my house, put into my living room this furniture which I don't need and cannot use?"

He answers: "Oh, because everybody in the neighborhood is doing that. Beside, all the useless-furniture people as well as all the movers and truck drivers need to have regular income. It's our job, you know."

Somehow, in a moment of temporary insanity, you accept. That's when you lose a big chunk of your life, because every day, these people -- the useless-furniture and useless-information professionals -- invade your living room to deliver stuff that is of no use to you.

Some readers might be shocked that I'm against the news media, but I should mention that I did receive journalism training at Concordia University and have worked as a journalist for a newspaper.

On the other hand, information is life for a certain group of people. They're called "capitalists." To be more precise, it is not their information that is valuable to these business people, but YOUR attention. As long as they have your attention, they can sell you something.

First of all, they get your ATTENTION. Then, through clever psychological manipulation, they get your INTENTION (to buy, what else, their products and services). Finally, they get you into (lifelong) DETENTION.

Detention is secured by the highest and ultimate marketing skill: the ability to create lifelong dependency on a product, service or company.

Marketing is, ultimately, the preemptive design of innocuous yet effective small-step commitments leading to lifelong, inescapable addictions.

This is why I submit that every piece of information is a mini Trojan horse: there's always a psychological trick that will move you closer to the goal of the information provider.

99% of the information in society is death. It does not bring life nor does it enhance your life. It just keeps you in a perpetual state of economic dependence, because it influences you to overspend and get into debt so you become the lifelong economic slaves of capitalists. If you did not depend so much on your job, then you would be able to quit anytime, and that is highly disruptive for any business enterprise. So they will do anything to prevent that from happening.

So what is the cure? How do we escape all the useless information that advertisers and companies are throwing at us?

The first step is to realize that just as "information is death," so "instruction is life."