johnny_castaway

In the pre-Internet era, when you were curious about tech X, you'd walk to a store, skim through a bunch of books, pick the one you liked the most, and take it home. The whole process of searching took less than an hour, and then you were committed, because back at home, it was the only material about X you had physically available. If something wasn't mentioned in the book, you couldn't Google it, tough luck. And reading that book was genuinely exciting, because with TV and offline games being the only alternatives, it was your strongest source of dopamine. You'd be picking it up instinctly, just like today you pick up a smartphone, because it was the most mysterious thing to explore within your reach.

These days, you type X into Google, and you get hit with an avalanche of tutorials, ebooks, video series, paid courses, online lectures, all available constantly and immediately. Then you fall into the rabbit hole of ratings, reviews, comments, forum discussions, opinions, endless comparisons of X vs Y vs Z, and so on, and so on. Right from the beginning you get analysis paralysis, FOMO, and anxiety. When you finally pick something up, the amount of material about any given topic, unconstrained by the volume of paper, seems impossible to get through in a single lifetime. Instead of peacefully exploring, it feels like you have to force-feed yourself just to get to the end of it. All of that while trying to ignore that video in your recommendations about the latest breaking news, or the other one promising to teach you quantum physics in 15 minutes.

Does anyone else feel like this?

Btw. you could say, just turn off the Internet and buy a book, but can you really pretend it doesn't exist? And how long can you stick to it?