We Were Never Supposed to Know This Much
On the cost of knowing everything, everywhere, all at once.
Most of us spend more time with the news than we’d like to admit. We check it in the morning before we’re fully awake, return to it between tasks, feel a pull toward it in quiet moments that might otherwise be restful. Something in us insists on knowing, on staying present to what’s unfolding in places we’ll never go, and for people whose lives look nothing like ours. That insistence is a form of conscience. It’s also, over time, a source of a very specific kind of exhaustion: the kind that comes from knowing too much to feel it properly, and feeling too much to know what to do with it.
The world arrives in our feeds as a continuous emergency. A war. A famine. A government collapsing. A climate event that will reshape a coastline. All of it distressingly real, all of it demanding some kind of response from us, and all of it gone from the front page by morning. We carry these things, but not in any way that helps us act on them. We know they’re happening without knowing what they mean, feel disturbed by them without knowing what to do, and then scroll to the next thing. That gap, between the scale of what we’re taking in and our capacity to process it, is where the weight accumulates.
That feeling of overload isn’t evidence of caring too much. It’s evidence of a profound mismatch between the scale at which information now arrives and the scale at which human beings were built to receive it.
The brain we brought to the internet
In 1992, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar published research connecting primate brain size to social group size. What he found was striking: the human neocortex is sized for a stable social world roughly the size of a village, intimate enough that we can track the histories, alliances, and emotional states of everyone in it. Beyond that scale, the cognitive architecture starts to strain. We were simply never built to hold more.
For most of human history, that was more than enough. We lived in communities where bad news had edges: a neighbor’s illness, a failed harvest, a conflict close enough to matter and local enough to address. The information environment was scaled to what a human nervous system could hold, process, and respond to in a meaningful way. Bad news came with a corresponding set of possible actions. Knowing about a problem and having some capacity to do something about it were rarely that far apart.
What’s happened since is not just a change in the volume of information, but a structural rupture in that relationship between knowing and doing. The internet didn’t simply give us more news. It collapsed every geographical and temporal boundary that had previously kept information at a manageable human scale. We now receive, in a single morning, detailed accounts of suffering from dozens of countries, political crises on multiple continents, and a running feed of expert opinion about all of it, alongside advertisements and the hot takes of strangers. All of it is real and all of it deserves moral seriousness. The brain receiving it, though, is the same one that evolved for a village, and it’s being asked to perform as a global news desk, a grief counselor, and a political analyst simultaneously.
There’s also a subtler problem: the feed isn’t a mirror of the world. It’s a distortion. Research consistently shows that engagement-based algorithms amplify emotionally charged content, particularly anger and outrage, over content that is neutral or resolution-focused. A story about a crisis keeps us scrolling longer than a story about a resolution. The world as it appears in our feeds isn’t proportional to the world as it exists. It’s been filtered through an optimization function that rewards activation, which means we’re not just receiving more information than we were built for. We’re receiving a skewed version of it.
What happens when we take in too much
The psychologist Paul Slovic has spent decades studying what he and other researchers call psychic numbing: the documented pattern in which human compassion does not scale with scale of suffering. We respond with full emotional force to one identified person in crisis, but as the numbers grow, the emotional response diminishes. The brain simply cannot sustain collective grief at global scale; the architecture wasn’t built for it.
What fills that gap is a cycling between brief floods of distress and a hollow numbness that passes for being informed. Distress at this scale is too diffuse to channel toward any action, while numbness is too complete to sustain real care. We end up stranded between the two, carrying the cognitive weight of the world’s suffering without the capacity to do anything meaningful with it.
The physical dimension of this is real and underappreciated. Consuming distressing content activates the body’s stress response: cortisol rises, the nervous system shifts into a state of alert, and the brain begins scanning for threat. Research on media consumption and stress shows that distressing news can trigger measurable physiological responses, not just emotional ones. When that activation happens repeatedly across many stories in a single sitting, the nervous system doesn’t fully return to baseline between each one. The cumulative effect, what some researchers call allostatic load, is part of why doom-scrolling leaves us feeling exhausted in a way that differs from ordinary tiredness. We haven’t necessarily done anything. We’ve just induced fear and stress, over and over, in rapid succession.
There’s also the problem of moral injury. Knowing about suffering creates an implicit obligation to respond to it. When we can’t, because the suffering is too distant or too vast or too complex for any individual action to address, we’re left with a specific kind of guilt that doesn’t have a clear outlet. We didn’t cause the crisis we read about, and we can’t fix it. But we know about it, and knowing without acting produces a residue. Over time, that residue accumulates into a low-grade sense of complicity, a feeling that we are failing the world simply by continuing to live our lives inside it.
Information science has a useful framework for thinking about why comprehension breaks down under these conditions. Raw data, the kind the news delivers in volume, only becomes usable once it’s organized and given context. That context becomes knowledge only when we’ve had time to understand what it means, and understanding only becomes actionable once we’ve developed enough judgment to know what to do with it. Algorithmic feeds deliver raw data faster than any of those transformations can occur. We’re handed data and expected, implicitly, to experience that as being informed. But understanding produces closure, and closure means we might stop scrolling, so the systems delivering that data have no structural interest in helping us achieve it. AI-driven recommendation engines have made this more efficient than it’s ever been: they don’t just surface what happened, they surface what will keep us activated the longest.
Reading about a crisis can feel like doing something about it. Following the news closely, staying updated, sharing articles, consuming analysis - all of it produces a sense of engagement that mimics participation without requiring it. Researchers have documented this pattern: the brain registers sustained attention as a form of action, especially when that attention is social, when we’re reading what others are reading, and reacting alongside them. The problem is that it substitutes for the kind of local, embodied action that would produce actual change. We mistake being informed for being engaged, and engagement for impact.
A few questions can help distinguish consumption that informs from consumption that just compounds the weight:
After reading the news, do we feel more oriented toward the situation, or further from it?
Do we return to the same sources multiple times in an hour, looking for updates on a story that hasn’t changed?
When something distressing happens somewhere in the world, does following the coverage change what we’re able to do about it?
Do we share news content because we believe sharing will produce a concrete effect, or for another reason?
Is there a difference between how we feel after reading a long, contextual piece on a topic versus scrolling a live feed about the same topic?
When we finish a session of news consumption, do we have a clearer sense of what we know, or a less clear one?
There are no correct answers, and the point isn’t to feel bad about what we notice. The point is that consumption which leaves us more scattered, more distressed, and no more capable of doing anything is consumption that’s working against us rather than for us. The news feed benefits from our continued presence regardless of whether we leave better informed. But we get to decide when we've had enough.
What to do with a village brain in a global feed
The answer isn’t to stop caring about the world. Willed ignorance isn’t a virtue, and “just log off” has always been advice written for people whose circumstances conveniently allow it. The relationship we have with how we take in information turns out to matter enormously, and that relationship is something we can shape.
What most conversations about news consumption miss is that the problem isn’t primarily about time spent or content consumed. It’s about whether we come to information with intent or sit open to whatever arrives. Passive reception, letting a feed decide what we see next and for how long, is a fundamentally different cognitive experience than active retrieval, going to a source with a specific question and leaving when that question is answered. The former keeps us in a state of ambient alert. The latter gives us a sense of agency over what enters our attention. Both might involve reading the same article. The experience of doing so is not the same.
The practice of building a different relationship with information might look like:
Knowing about something and being immersed in coverage of it are different things.
We can know a crisis is happening, understand its basic nature and scale, and hold it with appropriate moral seriousness without cycling through hourly updates, reaction threads, and analysis of the analysis. Following a story closely enough to understand it is not the same as staying inside the feed until the distress becomes ambient. The first is informed engagement. The second crowds out the attention we'd need to act.
Going to a source is different from opening a feed.
When we go to a specific source because we want to understand something, we're in a different cognitive state than when we open a feed and wait to see what arrives. The first has a natural endpoint. The second doesn't, by design. Even a small amount of intentionality about where we go and why, choosing a publication known for depth on a topic rather than opening a general feed, changes what we take in and how much of it sticks.
The news isn’t less true if we read it once, at a set time.
There are real reasons to return to a developing story: new information, changed circumstances, a detail that changes the picture. But there's a different kind of returning, the kind driven not by developments but by the discomfort of not knowing what happens next. That discomfort doesn't resolve with more coverage. It resolves when the situation does, which the feed can't accelerate no matter how often we check it.
Caring about everything at once is not the same as caring well.
When we have no meaningful way to act on a situation, sustained attention to it tends to compound distress rather than produce anything. Directing serious attention toward places where our participation changes outcomes isn't a retreat from the world. It's how care becomes something more than weight.
Fewer, better sources.
Choosing a small number of reliable sources on purpose, ones selected for depth over volume and for context over speed, changes the underlying relationship with information. Grazing across dozens of feeds produces exposure. Sustained attention to a few produces understanding.
When we’ve already taken in too much
Sometimes the question isn’t how to prevent overload. It’s what to do once we’re already inside it: cognitively scattered, carrying more than we’ve had time to process, and not quite sure what we understand versus what we’ve merely been exposed to.
The information literacy response to saturation isn’t to keep reading until clarity arrives. Clarity doesn’t arrive that way. It arrives when we stop accumulating and start processing, which are different activities that rarely happen at the same time. A few practices help get there:
Stop the input before attempting any output. Saturation compounds when we keep adding to it. Closing the feed, even temporarily, is the precondition for the brain to begin organizing what it already has. This sounds obvious and is harder than it sounds, because algorithmic systems are specifically designed to prevent natural stopping points. Recognizing that resistance as a design feature rather than a personal failure is itself a form of information literacy.
Recognize the loop before exiting it. When we’ve read multiple pieces about the same event and couldn’t say what the second or third added to the first, we’ve crossed from comprehension into activation. The question worth asking before opening the next piece isn’t “what’s new” but “what would this add to what I already understand?” If the answer is nothing but more of the same distress, that’s the loop making itself known.
Go to the source rather than the coverage. When a story is breaking, the content that orients rather than activates is usually the original: the report itself, the official statement, the data release, the transcript. Fifteen takes on what something means are all downstream of that source, and they’re all filtered through the same optimization pressure that rewards activation. Primary documents don’t have an engagement algorithm. They also tend to be shorter, more specific, and more clarifying than the coverage built around them.
Find the one person or organization closest to the problem. Saturation produces a feeling of obligation without direction, and the way that feeling compounds is by consuming more aggregate coverage in search of something that feels like a response. What moves us from activated to oriented is identifying one journalist who covers this beat with real expertise, or one organization doing direct work on the issue, and knowing where to go when we want to act rather than just absorb.
The story we’ve been handed about staying informed
There’s a pervasive cultural narrative that treats constant information consumption as a form of responsibility. That being perpetually informed is how we honor the suffering of others. That looking away constitutes moral failure.
But that narrative wasn’t built in our interest. It was built in the interest of systems that profit from our attention regardless of what that attention costs us. Receiving information is not the same activity as understanding it, and understanding it is not the same as acting on it. The conflation of all three serves the platforms far more than it serves us.
The discipline of information literacy has always pushed back against this. Its foundational premise is that access to information should serve the person seeking it, and that more is not inherently better. A librarian doesn’t hand someone every book in the collection and call it help. The work has always been about matching the right information to the right need at the right time, which requires judgment about what to include and what to set aside.
That judgment is a learnable skill. It develops through practice: noticing what information serves us versus what merely activates us, asking what we intend to do with what we’re about to read before we read it, building the habit of retrieval over the habit of reception. None of this requires exceptional willpower or unusual discipline. It requires treating our attention as something finite and valuable, and choosing accordingly.
We were built for a village, and the world we’ve inherited is something else entirely. The suffering in it is real, and some of it demands our attention and action. Working within our limits is how we stay capable of giving either. Choosing what to carry and how to carry it is how we make it possible to carry anything at all.
I'm feeling old.
I seem to have evolved all kinds of workarounds for the problems you describe. These include everything from not using algorithm-mediated social media, to routinely skimming headlines without clicking.
I also have a very specific purpose for following the news - specific types of events I want to know about, in time to do something about them at a personal level.
I'm not entirely clear why most others aren't doing the same, except perhaps that I've maybe learned something in my 68 years that they haven't yet learned in their 25 or 30.
Also, one quibble with your logic: evolution didn't stop when people began living in communities larger than villages, or getting news reports from outside their local neighborhood. The more harm excess information does to people, the more they will tend to evolve biological and cultural ways of mitigating that harm, or even reversing it.
We haven't had the specific social media algorithms long enough to evolve much in the way of defenses to them, but news media have been stressing stories that sell papers for long enough to begin to see effects.
Still, it's good that you make these points. Those who don't recognize they have a problem can't use their conscious-mind resources to deal with it.
And you made the points so much better than I could have done.
Thanks Hana, such a great way to combat overwhelm! I wonder if part of the reason is that there is the same amount of news that there was 50, or even 15, years ago but rolling news coverage an social media have to fill their time and so endlessly repeat to the point of of what Adam Curtis calls hypernormalisation.