The Internet Is Loud

Following Curiosity Beyond the Screen

There has never been a better time to be curious. With life feeling a touch too polarizing for my liking—an understatement, perhaps—and all of us being inundated with information we never knew we wanted to know, needed to know, or frankly needed to have an opinion about, I have found myself retreating more and more into curiosity.

And goodness, have I become curious. My family, and probably my doctors know that I have fallen down rabbit holes of medical journals, published theses, obscure case studies, and research from an array of disciplines simply because something made me wonder, But why? The truth is, nearly anything I could possibly want to know is sitting inside the little rectangle I carry around all day. I can watch someone make butter in Ireland before breakfast, learn how to prune a peach tree over lunch, listen to a lecture on sociology while folding laundry, read a case study on the latest medical discovery, and fall asleep watching a woman in the Cotswolds explain how she is painstakingly uncovering and restoring an eighteenth-century garden. It is truly extraordinary. It’s also… a lot.

Lately, as I’ve been thinking about becoming a student again—go read The Autumn Semester if you missed that little declaration, I’ve started to wonder whether having access to more information has actually made any of us better educated. Because information isn't necessarily education. Sometimes education is sitting with one author for 300 pages. It’s taking a class from someone who has practiced a craft for forty years, listening to an entire lecture without simultaneously scrolling, standing beside a fly-fishing guide and watching how they read the water, or learning a recipe from someone else’s grandmother.

Education requires allowing one person, one subject, or one idea to hold our attention long enough that we actually begin to understand it. And perhaps that last part is what we’re losing: attention.

The internet is very good at introducing us to things. It can spark curiosity in a matter of seconds. I have discovered books, places, people, recipes, hobbies, and entire subjects online that I might otherwise never have known existed, and I’m certainly not saying I want less of that. But I do want to become better at recognizing when it’s time to stop discovering and start learning; to think, question, and deepen my understanding rather than accepting every author, expert, creator, or opinion as something perfectly black or white.

There is a difference between watching twenty videos about gardening and spending an afternoon beside an experienced gardener. There is a difference between saving twelve posts about sourdough and putting your hands into dough week after week until you begin to understand what it should feel like, what it should look like, and how it behaves. There is a difference between following someone online who fly fishes and actually standing in moving water yourself; getting your cast completely wrong, fouling your flies, hooking the occasional tree, trying again, and eventually feeling the unmistakable tug of a fish on the other end of a cast that landed exactly where you intended it to.

One gives us information; the other gives us knowledge. And knowledge often asks something of us that the internet doesn’t: time, patience, repetition, failure, attention, and maybe even a little, or a lot, of humility. I have had plenty of loaves fall flat. I have hooked more trees and river bottoms than I could possibly count. I have dealt with disease and blight in my garden. I have navigated social gatherings and survived my share of blunders. But I keep trying, and more importantly, I keep learning.

I've started thinking about this as part of my own curriculum of curiosity. I don't simply want to know about more things; I want to know some things more deeply. I want books with bent spines, notes in the margins, and a pencil tucked behind my ear. I crave teachers who have spent decades doing the thing I’m attempting for the first time. I thrive in workshops where my hands are clumsy. I want museums I don't rush through and lectures that require me to sit still and think afterward. I wish for conversations with people who know things I don't. And occasionally, I want the good sense to close the seventeen tabs I’ve opened researching something and simply begin.

Perhaps being a lifelong student isn't about consuming more information at all. Maybe it’s about becoming more selective with our attention, choosing our teachers—and our confidants—carefully, following our curiosity beyond the screen and into daily life, and giving ourselves enough time with something for information to become understanding.

There will always be another article to read, another Reel to save, another podcast to queue, and another opinion to consider. The internet will still be there. But the trout stream is waiting, the book is on the nightstand, the dough needs tending, and somewhere, someone who has spent forty years mastering something is willing to teach us about their passion, their craft, or their life’s work.

I think I’d rather go learn.