The Behavior Gap by Carl Richards

Author:Carl Richards
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Too Much Information!

I admit that gathering the information we need to make rational decisions can help reduce our anxiety. But too much information can make our anxiety worse.

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the impact of technology on our lives—in particular, the way that it makes it possible for us to be connected to data all the time. We can check the performance of our stock portfolio in the middle of the night, on vacation, at our daughter’s wedding…and we do!

Why is that? What’s so compelling about all this data? How does it help us? Hurt us? I think these are important questions.

Not long ago, the popular blog BoingBoing ran an interview with independent game designer Jonathan Blow. When asked about one popular game (it’s called FarmVille), Blow explained that the game wasn’t designed to make players feel good.

It’s supposed to look cute and project “positivity.” But the game designers’ real aim is to get people to worry about it when they’re away from the computer. That way, they’ll be drawn out of their real lives, and go back to the game.

How often does thinking about money make you feel this way? Watching CNBC daily or checking in with Bloomberg on a regular basis rarely helps you feel better in the long term about your financial decisions. But you keep worrying, and checking, and worrying, and checking…

My phone contains feeds from all my favorite news sources, hundreds of podcasts, all my email newsletters, and a bunch of books. Now whenever there is a spare moment of quiet, I almost automatically fill the space with data. I’m like a sugar addict in a candy store. It’s just too easy to grab some.

It is becoming harder and harder to separate the signal from the noise. Most of us want to know what’s going on in the world. We feel like it’s our duty to be informed citizens, to watch the world markets, to stay on top of politics, and to keep up with the wide world of sports. If we don’t, we might miss something or be left out of the conversation.

Unfortunately, the sheer quantity of information makes it virtually impossible to sift through all the noise (most of it is just that) and find the stuff that actually matters. Worse, we’re losing our ability to distinguish between the two. What matters? What’s just noise?

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