Good Enough
Limited expectations for the Information Age
More and more I sense my ambitions exceeding my power. That there is more good than I can attain. I want what I cannot have, I want more than I can have.
I’ve been redoubling my efforts to live gratefully—inhale gratitude, exhale peace. Recognizing the good gifted from beyond my control relieves the feeling of losing gifts as they spill over the edge of my cup.
That sounds right to me: the amount of good in the world surpasses my capacity to win or enjoy it. So it seems reasonable to pursue that which is good, in gratitude for the enough that I have.
I feel this incapacity particularly in the arena of information. Today there is a flood of information. There always was, but it was hidden below the ground. It accumulated in the water table awaiting a lucky well digger. There would be the odd spring, or river, or ocean, and even the occasional flood, but nothing like the Biblically-proportioned flood we see today.
A flood is a funny thing. Too much of a good thing, really. Water sustains all the flora and fauna in the appropriate amount, and can just as easily erode a coastline, or slough a valley.
The motif of the flood rings throughout human history. It’s a time of undoing through overdoing. It’s a judgement. It’s a stress test: what will remain?
Information is a flood I welcome, albeit foolishly. As the sod of our society is being loosened and the foundations whirled away in the current, I began to think of the potential downsides of knowing more.
There is a happy-medium to knowing. Knowing not enough is dry, like a desert. Not much thriving to do out there. Hard to put roots down in the sand, even if it does rain, it turns from blessing to curse in a heartbeat, washing away what little was built on the sand.
Knowing too much, however, is like the flood, eroding even the stone you thought you built upon. The trees are uprooted, and flung about, the sod and turf shredded in the ancient solvent of water.
The Goldilocks Zone is somewhere in between, with enough water to produce fruit, to eat, or to behold. To maintain the vital turgidity of the plants that keep us company. Not so much that we slosh around day after day, and not so little that the dust kicks up as we tread through.
The amount of information isn’t the problem, but the area to contain it. As we fill with information, we are meant pass it on. In word and in deed we spill over to our children, biological or metaphorical.
Information is valuable, but only for life.
Information, like anything, can kill you. Especially if you never have enough.
How do we know we have enough?
Food and information are necessary for life. You cannot abstain permanently without dying. With food addiction there is the inherent problem of frequently and repeatedly encountering your demons. I put it this way intentionally. People with problems say they are battling demons. In romantic relationships, finances, employment, substance abuse, people say they battle their demons. But any one of those things listed can be stable and vibrant aspects of another person’s life. So the things themselves are not demons. They are the tools of your demons.
The same is true of all things. All things are good and useful for the destruction of the human person. So, as with the flood, there can be too much of a good thing, just as too much of a bad thing, or too little of either, etc.
Information serves a purpose. We take it in, and it forms us. There’s oodles more to be said about how we filter the information through our perceptions, but John Vervaeke can tell you more if you want. Nevertheless, we take it in, and it forms us.
We must be informed about our environment (Is it warm or cold? Wet or dry?Dangerous or safe?), other people (same questions), and other more abstract things like relationships between the first two things, ourselves, the past-present-future. So we’re always taking in and being formed.
This is where the question of enough shifts from the quantitative to the qualitative.
Enough is not an amount. When will you have enough money? I’m sure you can attempt to figure a number, though price of living fluctuates, but the answer varies. Can you live with little? Can you live with a dollar a day? Two? Twenty-five thousand? Your ability to survive is different than your drive for comfort. If you can live a quality life with a dollar a day but someone else can’t do it for less than $120, you have different qualitative standards for enough.
Information is the same way. Can you survive with only the immediate environmental facts, or do you want to know what everyone has thought throughout history? That is a question people haven’t had to wrestle with prior to the widespread access to information, and now the compression of information via AI summaries which imply your ability (read: moral imperative) to know everything.
Is a person supposed to know everything? What good does that do for them?
As with all my blogs, this delves into the definition of good. What does it mean to be a good person, or to live a good life?
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The word “good” has many uses in the English language. They are a network of the meaning of the word. Excellent, righteous, kind, skilled, moral, thorough. The definition I want to highlight is “satisfying”.
There is some sense of good that draws us forward. That’s one of its central definitions: to be desired. We are attracted to it. With food, or sex, or information, this is true, and with many other desires, too. If I continue to want, however, we can flip the scales, and begin to have these desires lead to the bad: that which is not to be desired. The initial desire is desirable, but the extent of it exceeds its bounds. Satisfaction enters the picture here as the balance. The not too hot, and not too cold, but just right.
Satisfaction bears with it a sense of enoughness. For the time being, there is no longer a need. But satisfaction, in the context of good, brings a tinge of duty, purpose, fulfillment. As though you were willed for just this reason.
I don’t know your reason, I can barely flail at mine as it torments me. But a good life, by my calculations, would be one lived fully to the satisfaction of its reason. Nothing more, nothing less.
There we find both good and enough.
Had to google Goldilocks zone. My upbringing tells me good enough is lazy or bad. At this point in life I know it’s ok most of the time. I love the [ both and ] of finding the good in good enough. We can’t all be Elon.
I enjoy the music of the words