We’ve Entered the Age of Informational Diabetes

You’re not broken. You’re overstimulated. And you're not alone. Our brains weren’t built for this endless sugar crash of information. Here's what we need to do about it.

Excited to publish Paul Shirley here at Beyond Parody, our first guest contributor. On our recent Walk-Ins Welcome discussion he mentions this concept of informational diabetes and it’s so accurate I asked him to elaborate for us. Enjoy! —Bridge

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Our brains are being overwhelmed. We’re now each exposed to something like 75 gigabytes of information every day. Five hundred years ago, this would’ve been the amount of information we would have been exposed to in an entire lifetime.

Then: 75 GB in a lifetime. Now: 75 GB in a day.

Our tendency to gorge on information makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. For most of history, information was both scarce and valuable. More information meant more warnings about the tribe that was coming over the hill to take our horses or our harvest. It meant clues about where to find food. It meant a rocket booster for our need to be the fittest and survive.

Then came the telegraph, the telephone, our harnessing of radio waves, of television, satellites, the personal computer, cellular phones, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a whole fleet of marketers, advertisers, and neuropsychologists who understood our appetite for information. And who figured out that this appetite was endless.

Our brains weren’t built to manage this amount of information, a reality we’re faced with whenever we try to shut out the noise and focus on a book we want to read, a poem we want to write, or an email we need to send. It’s not just the amount of information, of course; it’s also the changing methods for how that information is delivered: calls and texts and emails, sure. But also Instagram ads and Slack messages and all those bulletins and blogs and mailing lists you don’t remember signing up for.

If this were working for us, great. But when I look around, I don’t see a lot of people doing “great.” I see people who are busy without knowing why, who are exhausted even though all they have to do is sit, who can’t figure out why they feel so shattered.

My diagnosis: we’re giving ourselves informational diabetes.

All those marketers and advertisers and neuropsychologists I mentioned earlier—the ones working at the tech companies keeping us distracted—aren’t much different from another group of people who commoditized a temptation that had previously been both scarce and valuable: the merchants, scientists, and marketers who made refined sugar cheap and available and unleashed it on an unprepared audience.

You probably know the outlines of the history of refined sugar. Humans began refining sugar some 2,500 years ago, but for a very long time, the process was difficult and rare. Then, in the 19^th century, and thanks to some reasonable developments (technology) and some not-so-reasonable ones (the brutal efficiency of the slave trade), human consumption of refined sugar exploded from a spoonful a week in 1800 to a pound a week today.

What was once scarce and valuable and which had some evolutionary advantages (sweetness meant fruit was ripe) had become overwhelming and dangerous. And deadly.

Like refined sugar, Type II diabetes has been around since antiquity. Also like refined sugar, it was a relatively rare condition for a very long time. Until we got really good at delivering that refined sugar to people through some combination of farm subsidies, marketing, and our manufacturing capabilities (with an assist from the American government, which demonized fat over sugar thanks to some very sketchy goings-on in the 1950s).

Since 1980, worldwide cases of Type II diabetes have exploded, rising from 108 cases per million people to 537 cases per million, a cool 500% increase.

We’re at the start of a similar explosion. Except that instead of sugar and our bodies, the problem is information and our brains. We’ve entered the Age of Informational Diabetes.

So, what’s to be done?

Just like our battle with Type II diabetes, the first step is noticing the problem. With sugar and diabetes, the job of noticing is a little more straightforward: our teeth rot, our bellies get big, we might have to have a leg amputated.

With informational diabetes, the symptoms are a little harder to discern because we’re processing those symptoms with the same organ being bombarded by the cause of the problem. We need to get information from the same place that’s being overwhelmed by information. It’s like we’re trying to make dinner plans with a friend who also happens to be the last air traffic controller on Earth.

Making matters worse: we’re quickly forgetting what normal feels like. I run a co-working space in Denver so I’m in touch with all sorts of people and all sorts of ways those people work. It has now become rare that I meet someone who does not tell me they think they have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), so much so that I now say, with some seriousness, that if everyone has ADHD, no one has ADHD.

ADHD is now the default setting.

Once we do notice the problem—perhaps by coming into contact with someone who isn’t being wrecked by the supercomputer in their pocket—there are answers. These answers have to do with rebuilding the rituals we use to keep all this information at bay, reconnecting to people who help keep us present, and standing up for ourselves against the creeping influence of Big Tech.

But perhaps the most important thing we can do is to admit we have a problem, but without the guilt and shame I see from most people.

Perhaps this will help:

The 2024 budget for America’s military—the largest military in the history of the world—was around $850 billion

The 2024 revenue for four companies that make up a large portion of the Distraction Industrial Complex (DIC)—Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple—was around $1.5 trillion.

In other words, whenever you sit down to try to focus on that book, that poem, or that email, you’re up against a flood of distractions financed by a budget double that available to the largest military in world history.

It’s OK that you’re distracted. We all are. We all have informational diabetes.

And eventually, we’ll come up with societal solutions. We’ll put up some guardrails. We’ll make it impolite to pull out our phones at dinner. We’ll figure out which of these methods for communication actually serve us. We’ll outlaw Slack.

It won’t always be this way. Especially if we start talking about what informational diabetes is doing to us: wrecking our brains, destroying our creativity, and keeping us from doing the thing that most makes us human—connecting to one another.

Paul Shirley is a writer and founder of The Process in Dever, CO. Check out Paul's Book - The Art of Focused Work - https://bit.ly/44uKe6o