Search Them Diligently

I open this article by talking about my faith tradition, but this actually isn’t an article about religion — not exclusively anyway.

Each morning, I spend time studying the religious texts used in my church. In the vernacular, they’re known as “canonized scripture”.

In my church, we also have two conferences of the church at the general level. We call them, not imaginatively, General Conference. During these conferences, we hear from our general church leaders during four or five 2-hour sessions. For a lot of people, that’s a long time listening to people sermonize. Probably until I was in my early 30s, I would have wholeheartedly agreed. Something definitely changed in me when I began to appreciate the value in my own life I gained by really hearing to what I needed to learn.

In my scripture study this morning, a short phrase caught my eye:

Search them diligently

I had an important realization: the writer of the text wasn’t just talking about the particular passage I read.

2.5 quintillion bytes. That is the CloudTweaks estimate on how much data is created each day in 2022. A letter is one byte. The average word has 4 letters. Therefore, the equivalent of 625 quadrillion words is generated daily. According to some estimates, the Library of Congress currently holds about 15 terabytes (TB) of information. Each day in 2022, 2.5 million TB of data are created — essentially 167,000 libraries of congress! 167,000 libraries of Congress created each and every day.

It’s an understatement of comedic proportions to say that we’re creating a lot of new data every day.

Of course, it’s impossible for a person to consume — in a meaningful way — even a tiny fraction of the total content produced each day. And yet, we are daily bombarded by a huge number of “outlets” clamoring for our attention.¹

Here then is the fundamental question:

With so much content coming at us all the time, how do we know what to pay attention to?

This is where the phrase “search them diligently” resonated.

The taxonomies of content categorization are almost as varied as the content they attempt to categorize. For the most part, the categorization is contextual to the source and the consumer. Without getting too deep into the weeds, consider that perhaps your interests are in the health sciences. Content might then be categorized into case studies, general health, training, etc. If you’re into cat videos, the categories will be entirely different.

For my purposes, I want to categorize content into 4 buckets: essential-general, essential-specific, interesting, and trivial.

Essential-General Content

This is the stuff that most people typically know by the time they reach their early 20s:

How to tie shoes
How to ride a bike
How to (more or less) safely operate a vehicle
How to prepare basic meals
How to wash clothing
How to find help when you need it

Two things should be obvious here:

This list could easily be expanded to include hundreds of thousands of things, many of which we take for granted because they become second nature.
This is a generalization. Of course I realize there are mental deficiencies that prevent a significant portion of the population from knowing some or all of even this tiny list of things.

Essential-Specific Content

This is the content that has domain context. For example, if you’re an elementary school teacher working with the primary (kindergarten) class, this will include knowledge on how to help small children begin to recognize (and sometimes make) the sounds of your alphabet. It may also include the basics of forming words, and how to read. If you are a neurophysiologist², your domain-specific knowledge will center around the brain, spinal cord, and nerve roots (among other things).

Whether you’re talking about parenting, teaching, or building space shuttles, this is the information that allows you to perform the tasks specific to that functional role.

Interesting

Interesting is the content that has the potential to make you a better person. While it may not be essential for you to understand how a car’s engine works, it may be very useful if your car breaks down on the side of the road. Because we find interest here, this is also the content domain that piques our interests outside of our typical functional roles. A mother who has the opportunity and desire to stay home to raise her children, for example, might still find great interest in studying computer programming in her limited free time. Later in life, when her children are grown, this may serve her if she decides to enter (or return to) the workforce.

This is also the domain of learning just for the sake of learning. It’s perfectly okay to learn something without having some end goal in mind as to what you’ll do with that information. Always learning is a key factor in maintaining good cognitive function as you age.

Trivial

This is the content that doesn’t matter. This also happens to make up the overwhelming majority of what is produced on the internet each day. Most of what we consume in a given day is not useful or interesting. It is content designed by its creators (even if unwittingly) to get us to waste time.

Again, I recognize that as a sweeping generalization that should be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes, this trivial content is exactly what we need to combat the push to be always on and always productive. Sometimes, a couple of cat videos are exactly what the doctor ordered.

Search them diligently is a phrase that, just today, became synonymous with focusing my time and attention on the information that aligns with my values. I have nothing against cat videos, but they don’t line up with my values (because I am not a cat person). So, it doesn’t serve me (even in the trivial) to watch cat videos.

Growing up, I had many pets (none of them cats). My youngest child has an acute interest in animals and I really enjoy sitting down with him and investigating the wonders of nature that we can find online. I value time with my children and learning new things about animals so watching a video with my youngest of a squirrel running a maze serves multiple purposes that align with my values.

As you consider what content to consume, look for those things that align with your values and discard the rest.³ Of course, you will still have to search diligently to find the sources that align most closely with your values.

It’s a lifelong pursuit.

Thanks for reading!

¹The irony is not lost on me that I am, to a degree, clamoring for your attention though, as I’ve stated before, I write on Medium more for myself than anyone else because I love writing, but am not trying to make a career of it. As of 2022, I make enough money writing on Medium to cover exactly 1 trip to Del Taco each month.

²In 3 attempts, I failed to spell that word correctly from memory. Beyond what I mentioned above, I won’t pretend to know what a neurophysiologist actually does.

³I won’t be offended (much) if you stop following me on Medium since you’ve just realized that what I write doesn’t align with your values.