Like every other child of the 70’s, I grew up using books to learn. Instead of the Internet, I remember enormous sets of encyclopedias people used for reference at the library. Hell, I even flipped through hundreds of their pages the few times that I actually used them there. It was a mystery to me how all that information could be packed into so few books, but they were printed with really small text so I guess that helped; computers would have probably blown my kid mind.

I idolized my uncle Larry, and he was into astronomy so that was always my go-to subject. I wrote a couple middle school papers on “the planets” so it’s no surprise that Britannica’s pictures of them probably generated my first interest in cosmology. If the Internet was around back then, I wonder how that interest would have been influenced by its easy feedback on a query. At least with an encyclopedia I had to put out (substantial) energy flipping through pages and manually sifting through text to find the information I wanted; it was quite a time investment.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

I carried a substantial interest of astronomy into adulthood, and eventually it lead me to other related fields, among them chaos and string theories, Einstein’s several theories of relativity, and other related topics in cosmology and general physics. I’ve read many books on these topics, and was for years proud of myself for keeping up the interest hatched nearly 20 years before.

But I noticed a side-effect. Where before simple curiosity drove my book purchases and the interest that put my nose in their pages, I began feeling a sense of dread about trivial things like our sun exploding or the collision of galaxies or radiation from the center of the giant black hole we believe exists in the middle of the Milky Way. I began searching my selected reading for explanations that might oppose what seemed like the eventual certain extinction of our planet. I began to realize I was reading to quell my fear of a future demise so far advanced that it did not involve me or any human: not only did I dread my own death, but I worried about the billion-year future when our sun becomes a red giant and definitely snuffs out all life remaining on earth. Or an asteroid impact that would kill everyone, I mean take your pick.

Who knows, maybe it was the Internet — with its instant presentation of all knowledge — that accelerated me to the peak of my emotional frenzy, when I first contemplated the finality of life and spent the weekend crying in the bath tub. But honestly, that crisis was a long time in the making. The only reason I was honest with myself at that moment in my life was aparantly that I gave up using interest in science as a crutch, and no longer delayed a truer and more valuable — albeit more painful — thought process.

The complete extinguishing of my interest in scientific materials took another 10 years. I don’t believe it is any coincidence that I’ve had the most meaningful experiences of my life after I gave up the pursuit of knowledge in those fields. Today I have a completely different outlook on not only the relevance to me of what we generally refer to as “knowledge”, but about the information itself — and I wonder, if others around me were aware of my present perspective, how might it change our relationships.