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The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is a worthwhile 15 or 20 minute read; it is very short. It is not Christian; it is in the Old Testament. The power of the words are in their antiquity. The fact that someone was expressing these sentiments at least a couple thousand years ago is revealing. Nothing has changed since then. Nothing is new under the sun. It doesn’t have anything directly to do with information, but in my mind it is inextricably related because it is a reductionist point of view. All this information we are piling up is a meaningless “chasing after the wind.” Answers are not to be found in information. The author concludes that the best a person can do is to find pleasure in his or her food, drink and work.

What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to some will not be remembered by those who follow.

Here is the penultimate paragraph of the first chapter from Eckhart Tolle’s book “Stillness Speaks.” I have had this book for quite some time, predating donewith.info, and was just re-reading it recently and was struck by how similarly his sentiments here parallel mine:

Do you need more knowledge? Is more information going to save the world, or faster computers, more scientific or intellectual analysis? Is it not wisdom that humanity needs most at this time?

Information is the commodity of the Information Age, and educational institutions are the new marketplaces. Colleges and universities don’t deal in oranges, washers or wheel barrows, but in something much less tangible: information. If someone is on the bottom end of the information curve (not the intelligence curve!), the refrain is get thyself an education! Like so many things, this is great on paper, but the implementation is less certain, and perhaps even insidious.

As I mentioned, educational institutions are essentially marketplaces nowadays, and things are not generally provided free of charge in a marketplace. The cost of education is astounding and prohibitive. What? You don’t have between $20,000 and $200,000 to spend? Then take out student loans that you’ll be paying back for years to come. Why not? Everyone else is up to their ears in debt, why shouldn’t you be, too?

At all events, education isn’t the solution to the world’s problems. Sure, education is useful and everyone needs a trade, but our modern educational systems are not about growing better people, but about cramming yet more information into the heads of people with the hope that enough of it will stick to allow that person to navigate the waters of the Information Age.

Here is an illustrative snippet from the book Hard Times by Charles Dickens:

Thomas Gradgrind, Sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, Sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind—no, Sir!

We need to be teaching people how to be more compassionate and more sensitive to their surroundings, not how to try to manipulate the world as if it were just data in a spreadsheet.

In his book Fatu Hiva, Thor Heyerdahl says the following:

“There is nothing for modern man to return to,” I admitted. I said it most reluctantly, for our wonderful time in the wilderness had given us a taste of what man had abandoned and what mankind was still trying to get even farther away from. [...] Progress today can be defined as man’s ability to complicate simplicity. Nothing in all the procedure that modern man, helped by all his modern middlemen, goes through before he earns money to buy a fish or a potato will ever be as simple as pulling it out of the water or soil. Without the farmer and the fisherman, modern society would collapse, with all its shops and pipes and wires. The farmers and the fishermen represent the nobility of modern society; they share their crumbs with the rest of us, who run about with papers and screwdrivers attempting to build a better world without a blueprint.

I can’t think of a better way to sum up donewith.info.