From the Age of Abundance to the Age of Clutter

Do you remember the movies you watched on Netflix in the past couple of years?
Do you remember the movies you watched on Doordarshan years ago?

The answer to the first question is most likely no, and the answer to the second question is most likely yes.

When we had just one movie a week, those movies made a special place in our heart and brain (even the bad ones – like Amitabh’s “Saudagar” which I really disliked as a child because it did not fit into my image of Amitabh Bachchan). But today with all the abundance in entertainment we don’t even remember what we watched last month.

The abundance of information, knowledge and entertainment is creating clutter in our lives. Not too long ago we gained knowledge through books. These books we had to buy, so they were always limited. I finished almost every book that I had bought. Today I can buy loads of books but can’t finish them.
If I want to know about something, I search for podcasts or YouTube videos to learn. But then there are so many of them available, we don’t even know on which ones we should spend our limited time (we just fall prey to their algorithms).

We are all part of WhatsApp groups which we never even open (but we joined hoping to learn something). We scroll Instagram “for knowledge and entertainment” but neither we learn nor feel entertained after an hour of doomscrolling. On LinkedIn we just see AI-written articles that we don’t even feel like going through.

You see, the age of abundance – the desired goal of a capitalist society – is turning into the age of clutter. We are just unable to cope with the onslaught of news, information, data, entertainment (much of it is spam and fake even but we may not know). How do you survive this onslaught? Let me know your thoughts?

P.S. One of the use cases of AI must be to cut the clutter from our lives and give us only just-in-time, relevant guidance (without selling my soul to marketers – you know what I mean).