We Found the Internet and Lost Our Minds

 

You carry the accumulated knowledge of civilization in your pocket, and then spend six hours scrolling garbage.

Fr. Joseph Gleason | August 30, 2026

 

TRANSCRIPT

We have more information in our pockets than ancient kings had in their entire kingdoms. And somehow we still seem to understand less than they did.

Modern people are difficult to impress.

We’ve seen everything, Googled everything, watched the documentary, read the headline, heard the podcast. Ask a question, and somebody already has a confident answer.

But there’s a problem. Knowing something and understanding something are not the same thing.

You can know fifty facts about your wife and still not understand her. You can memorize theology and not understand God. You can know the day the war began, the names of the generals, and the casualty figures, and understand nothing about what it feels like to lose a son, because genuine understanding requires something that information alone cannot provide.

And that’s love.

We still preserve a strange little memory of this in English. When someone truly memorizes something, they say they “know it by heart”.

Not by brain. By heart.

Maybe the ancient Egyptians took this idea too far. During mummification, they carefully preserved the heart and the other organs, but they often discarded the brain. Apparently, they thought the brain wasn’t all that important.

Modern neuroscience may object. Fair enough. But perhaps the Egyptians accidentally understood something about us.

We have made the brain king. We pour news, videos, arguments, statistics, memes, notifications, scandals, and trivia into it from morning to night. And then we mistake being informed for being wise.

Worse, modern man stands on top of history, looking backward with incredible arrogance:

“Those poor primitives! They had no smartphones, no Google, no antibiotics, no Wi-Fi. Obviously, we must be smarter.”

But imagine the horrifying possibility that someone who lived a thousand years ago, no electricity, no internet, and who had seen very few books in his entire lifetime, understood love, death, suffering, friendship, beauty, God, and himself better than we do.

Technology advances. Civilizations accumulate information. But human beings do not automatically become wiser.

You can carry the accumulated knowledge of civilization in the smartphone in your pocket, and then you can spend six hours scrolling garbage.

We have never known so much.

The uncomfortable question is whether we have ever understood so little.

 

Source: https://movingtorussia.substack.com/p/we-found-the-internet-and-lost-our