What Is Information?

This is part two of a series on attention. It stands alone, but it builds on part one, about agency, which I'd recommend reading first.

We've all been there: a dozen tabs open, articles saved for later, the bookmark folder that never ends, a couple of documentaries queued, a half-read thread about something I'm peripherally interested in. None of it was junk. It was all good, considered, exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to fill your head with. It produced nothing. It felt productive in the moment, but by the end of the day something about it felt hollow.

We treat information as though it's good for you. Somewhere back in school it got fixed in us that learning is virtuous, that the diligent move is always to consume more, that a head full of good inputs is itself an achievement. It feels like common sense. I think it's quietly one of the most expensive things a person can believe, and seeing why means asking: what is information, actually?

Answer

So what is it? Not a substance, not something you accumulate. Information is that which informs, and nothing informs without someone to be informed. A fact sealed in a book informs no one. It becomes information only when it meets a mind with a question it happens to answer. The page is inert. The informing happens in you, or not at all.

So value is not a property of the information, it's in the contact. The same earnings report is alpha to someone at a hedge fund and noise to everyone else. The report didn't change, the recipient did. And the question it meets can be grand and ever-evolving or totally trivial: "what should I do with my life" is one, "how do I centre this div" is another. Each turns its matching information live and leaves the rest as noise. There's also no tier where documentaries outrank TikTok, no shame in the easy stuff: a song that genuinely lifts you isn't a lesser use than a lecture, it's information answering a real question, which today is how to feel good. Being moved by a film or a song earns nothing and produces nothing, and it is still fuel for a life: it inspires the parts of you that do. The worth was never in the thing. It's in the fit between the thing and what you're trying to do.

The costume of learning

Once you see information as a means, you can see the failure in treating it as an end, consuming for the sake of consuming. Even scrolling reels can come dressed as productive once you've internalised the false premise: the next one might teach me something about fishing. An afternoon of good inputs can feel like work even when it affects nothing. So can enrolling in one more master's degree to delay employment a little further.

Notice when the binge tends to start. Usually right when there's a negative emotion we don't want to feel: a hard call to make, a piece of work that might expose us, a low mood we'd rather not sit in. It's easier to distract ourselves with the infinite now of information than to confront the emotion underneath, attention aimed at the fear instead of the work. "I'm staying informed" is the costume over "I don't want to do this because it makes me feel bad."

Aim it toward action

Information is only valuable for the goal it serves, so it's worth checking whose goals you're serving. Determine your own, or they'll be handed to you: by the feed, by your parents, by whoever you spend your time around.

And a goal is not something you consume your way toward. This is the part we get wrong: information is only useful as fuel for action toward a purpose. Gather it forever and you have done nothing, you have just felt like you did. Reading can't even tell you whether what you read is true for your case. You can absorb every article on whether users prefer feature A or B and still be guessing; the only way to know is to ship both and watch what they do. Reason and research take you to the edge of the map, and then there is fog. Action reveals what is beyond the haze, the only test of whether your premise was useful or just borrowed from a textbook that said make every button blue.

Action is also where real differentiation comes from. Bill Gates has roughly the same access to books, films and food as most of us. What I will never have is what he built, and none of that came from consuming, all of it from the action of producing. What you consume shapes you into the average of your inputs, but what you do is how you make yourself. So act toward something you actually choose and want, and your life becomes more differentiated, more your own, more interesting and more unique.

The information we avoid

There is one kind of information we are especially good at refusing, and it is usually the most useful: the kind that gets in the way of what we want. It arrives as an uncomfortable emotion, or as a failure. Both feel like things to get away from, which is exactly why we reach for the feed. But a bad feeling is data about what you are avoiding, and a failure is data about where your model of the world was wrong. Sit with either instead of fleeing it and it tells you something you could not have read anywhere.

So process the emotion rather than bury it, and treat the failure as a result rather than a trait of your character. And introspect your goals often, because aiming is not something you do once. The clearer you are on what you actually want, the more of this hard information you can actually use.

Information the fuel

None of this makes information less worth having, it makes it worth aiming. The hollow evening, the saved tabs, the queued documentaries: none of it was the problem, and none of it was ever the point. Information is only ever the fuel. Life is what you build with it, in a direction you choose, so it will shape you. So consume less for its own sake, get clear on what you want, and go act on it.