We live today in a blizzard of information. The devices in our hands and homes give us unprecedented access to knowledge. But with that advantage is the challenge of filtering gems from the dross.
There is so much content crying for our attention, and so many competing narratives and agendas, it’s hard to grasp what’s really going on in the world. And that’s before you throw in head-spinning policy announcements by US president Donald Trump, or sudden shifts in global politics that are upending old certainties on a near daily basis.
“We live in an age in which there is too much information, less knowledge and even less wisdom, writes novelist Elif Shafak in her essay How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division.
“That ratio needs to be reversed. We definitely need less information, more knowledge, and much more wisdom.”
But how do you distil wisdom from the twin streams of knowledge and information?
Help is at hand from the world of philosophy: A three-step programme for decluttering your mind and focusing on what really matters.
1. Value your attention
Iris Murdoch helps us to understand the importance of attention by examining love. Love is a type of looking; sometimes refusing to look away. The Dublin-born philosopher used this realisation to define attention as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent,” she wrote.
Murdoch teaches us that the stakes are much higher than you think. Your brainpower and focus are not mere commodities in the “attention economy”, they define your moral character.
Murdoch died in 1999 before social media took off. But she leaves us with this question: If you’re distracted all the time, is it possible to love?
2. Read poetry
“As active persons, we rarely read poetry any more,” the Korean-German critical theorist Byung-Chul Han observes. “Dazed by the rush of information and communication, we move away from poetry as the contemplation of language, and begin even to hate it. When language is nothing but work and the production of information, it loses its radiance.”
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Poetry rehabilitates language – Han calls it “an art of healing”. It could not be further from our favourite forms of communication in 2025: emoji-laden WhatsApps, or sub-280-character social media posts.
If you wish to know about the reality of war, don’t read X. Read Siegfried Sassoon’s Base Details or Bertolt Brecht’s War Has Been Brought into Disrepute.
Poetry creates “the most intimate communion of the finite and the infinite”, according to the 18th century German writer Novalis. It’s also a nice way of giving two fingers to Big Tech.
3. Channel your inner hedgehog
“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing,” wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. It comes from the story of the hedgehog who outwits the fox by a single defensive manoeuvre – curling into a ball with spikes protruding.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin later used the dichotomy to classify leading scientists and artists according to whether they matched one type or another.
Plato and Karl Marx were hedgehogs. They each had a singular, overarching idea: Plato, the nature of truth; Marx, the necessity of economic revolution. What information was available fitted each theory, or else was made to do so.
Aristotle, Shakespeare and James Joyce were foxes. They “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory”, Berlin explained. Their thinking was more fluid and devoid of ideology.
Berlin said he designed the polarity in a playful manner and cautioned against applying it too rigidly. The truth is most famous thinkers – and most of us ordinary folk – are a mix of fox and hedgehog.
We have opinions, perceptions and beliefs that fluctuate regularly and help us to achieve certain goals. But we also have “deep beliefs”. These are perhaps moral principles, or tenets of religious faith, that provide our lives with direction and give us ballast at times of need.
What belief, if any, do you have that is non-negotiable? What “one big thing” do you know? The legal scholar Ronald Dworkin offered an answer to this question in the last book he wrote before his death, Religion Without God.
Dworkin, who also wrote a book called Justice for Hedgehogs that was inspired by Berlin’s theory of types, advocated holding firm to two core judgments: “The first holds that human life has objective meaning or importance ... The second holds that what we call ‘nature’ – the universe as a whole and in all its parts – is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder.”
Belief in these twin principles acted as a fallback position for Dworkin, repelling all arguments – just as the hedgehog’s spikes, when called upon, repelled all attackers. Blind faith is not to be advocated. Nor must you accept Dworkin’s specific judgments. However, in a world of rampant disinformation, and where some of the world’s richest and most powerful men are trying to shape your beliefs, it’s time to channel your inner hedgehog.
If you believe in nothing, prepare to be eaten by foxes.
