We’ve all had the experience. We sit down with someone we just met, and in less time than it takes to let our latte cool, we’ve heard their life story. Sometimes the details are more than we want to hear, or other times there are too many names or places or other items with which we don’t have enough familiarity. Soon, internally, we’re thinking, “Oh my! This is too much information!” In my younger years, I would have referred to it as TMI.
Oh, it’s not that listening to someone’s story is not good. It’s that sometimes we can hear more than we want to hear from someone’s story all at once. Or the details they share hit us in places where we don’t need any more battering. TMI can be overwhelming. It’s sometimes like drinking from a fire hose when we aren’t even thirsty.
The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that it seems to characterize our current age. The term more recently used is “information overload.” See the wiki page here for a broad overview of the phenomenon. The biggest problem with TMI is that it results in poorer decisions! Some information is good, apparently, but too much is very bad.
The real problem with TMI is that information is NOT knowledge. I know I have sometimes confused the two, but there’s a decided difference. That TMI friend may have given me a lot of information, but it will take me a lot longer to get to know them, to understand them. Sometimes, I make the mistake of assuming that since I know information about someone, that I know them. Such an assumption is simply not true.
But the Lord takes it one step further: knowledge is not wisdom. There are many examples in the book of Proverbs that speak to this truth. One of the clearest is Proverbs 24:3-4. “By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.”
This proverb expresses a process. It begins with wisdom as the means to build a house (life, marriage, business, etc.), which is strengthened by understanding, so that we have enough knowledge to fill in all the details (rare and beautiful treasures). Information is kind of a building block for all the rest. Without the wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, the building blocks aren’t of much use, and can become dangerous.
For example, a while back, I had a home built. I paid a lot of money to a general contractor to oversee its construction. Unbeknownst to me, the person doing the plumbing took short-cuts that endangered the entire house. He decided to cut large holes through several floor joists to get a piece of drain pipe to the location where it needed to go. He had the right information, and the general contractor thought that was fine. However, the building inspector would not pass the final inspection because that was a dangerous way to run the pipe. The floor joists were weakened and could potentially fail. The plumber may have known what he was doing, but he did not understand how it affected the rest of the building! The general contractor knew how to hire the plumber, but he didn’t understand enough to oversee his work. He and the plumber both lacked wisdom that, fortunately, the inspector had.
Our culture is fraught with information that is pushed at us without knowledge, understanding, or wisdom. It gets wrongly applied, misused, and often misrepresented. In essence, it is noise that makes the job of understanding more difficult, much like a loud vehicle motor makes conversation in its vicinity difficult to comprehend.
So, lately, I’ve begun to work on understanding what I’m hearing or reading, rather than just letting it all blast me into submission. It has helped to read less “junk” (ads, news, and other click-bait), and to rest my brain by ignoring screens for a bit. As I’ve reduced the information flow, I’ve been better able to understand. I’ve actually developed a little wisdom, too!
Just a bit of insight I’m learning. It’s time for less information and more wisdom…