A flash flood in Nepal appears on our phone. Photographs, videos, casualty figures, warnings, commentary, outrage, climate anxiety. Within minutes, something that happened in a particular place has entered our living rooms, our conversations and, if we are not careful, our emotional weather.
Of course, we should know about suffering. We should care. Climate change is real, disasters are real, and indifference is not wisdom. But there is a difference between being informed about the world and allowing the machinery of information to manufacture our inner world for us.
Hegel, the great German philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, writing long before the smartphone, observed that newspaper reading in the morning was a kind of “realistic morning prayer.” The newspaper once oriented people toward the world. Today, the phone can do it continuously—from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep.
And perhaps that is where we should pause.
We don’t need less knowledge. We need more sovereignty over what gets to occupy our minds. That is increasingly becoming a question of adulthood.
We don’t need to know everything everybody else knows. There is something strangely adult about saying, “I don’t know that singer.” Or, “I’ve never watched that film.” Or, “I haven’t followed that controversy.” Not because ignorance is admirable, but because a mature person understands that attention is finite—and therefore precious.
There is a small territory of consciousness that ought to remain ours.
We need to know the interesting bits about ourselves: what makes us laugh, what we notice on a walk, the people we love, the books that disturb us, the food we enjoy, the memories that still have warmth, the questions we cannot answer, the ordinary things that make a day feel worth having.
Modern news culture can make these things feel almost trivial. It continually tells us what is important now. And because “now” is repeated thousands of times, we begin to confuse immediacy with importance.
People routinely say, “We are living in a terrible age.” Doomsday jargon gets passed around. Biblical references appear. Earthquakes, floods and disasters everywhere are gathered into one continuous atmosphere of alarm.
Really? Who anointed the age?
Compared with what—the fifteenth-century Burmese kingdom, Ashoka’s reign, Nagaland in the 70s with bell-bottom trousers and sunshine curls, or some imagined golden age that never actually existed? Even Alice in Wonderland had that smug Queen whose chief contribution to public policy was, “Off with their heads!” Verdict first. Evidence later.
A tragedy in Nepal is tragic. A political crisis is serious. A war is horrifying. But none of these facts, by themselves, can tell us what our entire life means.
That is the great abbreviation.
Politics reduces human beings to entrenched positions. News reduces events to developments. Algorithms reduce attention to engagement. Outrage becomes measurable. Sadness becomes content. Anger becomes traffic. Fear becomes a business model.
Our inner lives are being industrialised and commercialised. And that is particularly dangerous for the free thinker.
The free thinker needs distance between reality and the interpretation of reality. The honest thinker must occasionally ask: What do I actually think about this? What do I know? What am I merely being encouraged to feel, think or take sides on?
There is another subtle trap—the false equivalence of knowledge with virtue. If you don’t know the latest controversy, someone can make you feel uninformed and bam,
Bosti manu!!
If you don’t share the approved emotional response, you can be made to feel morally deficient. If you haven’t consumed the same information, you are somehow behind. Guilt becomes your pivot point to agree or disagree.
Must you allow that?
Knowledge is power only when it enlarges the person who possesses it. If knowledge makes us smug, frightened, contemptuous or permanently certain, perhaps we have acquired information without acquiring wisdom and discernment. Likely, someone you know.
Adulthood is not knowing everything. It is knowing what deserves your attention.
Human nature is far more complicated than the categories through which modern public discourse presents it. Inside the revolutionary there may be a peacemaker; inside the peacemaker, a capacity for violence. Inside the adult is a child; inside the child, the beginnings of an adult. We contain contradictions.
Whenever someone offers us a completely simplified picture of humanity, we should become suspicious.
This matters particularly in Nagaland. Over the past few years, our own media space has expanded enormously. Nagaland TV, Hornbill TV, Global Network and dozens of other outlets now compete for our attention, alongside national television, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and every other platform delivering news into our phones. A small state suddenly has a very large information ecosystem.
More voices and more information are not necessarily bad. But something else has happened quietly: our mental horizon has expanded along with the media. We can now consume an extraordinary quantity of information about people we will never meet, places we may never visit and controversies that may have little to do with the texture of our own lives.
A lover’s murder somewhere between Madhya Pradesh Indore and Meghalaya gets dragged into our bedroom, and then the projection begins. Must we indulge our imaginations like this?
The question is no longer whether information is available. It is whether we have become too available to information.
Because once the media ecosystem becomes continuous, it doesn’t merely tell us what happened. It begins to suggest what we ought to be thinking about, what we ought to be worried about, what we ought to be angry about—and even what kind of person we ought to be. Information can quietly become an invasion of our interior life.
Our actual problems are much closer to home.
Our geography is specific. We are not living on the immediate edge of every glacial lake or exposed to every kind of sudden mass deluge.
But climate change is visible, and our vulnerabilities are real. The warning for Nagaland may therefore be less about copying somebody else’s catastrophe and more about confronting our own habits: procrastination, environmental neglect, weak institutions, deferred decisions and the tendency to kick difficult questions down the road.
That is where the real work is. The external world does not need to become our permanent psychological residence.
We can care about Nepal without becoming Nepal’s disaster. We can know about politics without becoming permanently political. We can understand the climate without living in perpetual anxiety. We can be informed without surrendering our interiority.
Perhaps this is one of the quiet tests of adulthood: being perfectly comfortable not knowing what everyone else knows.
“I don’t know Abu.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“I haven’t followed him.”
And then—nothing terrible happens. The world continues. You are still yourself. There is freedom in that.
Don’t outsource your consciousness. Leave some space for a cup of tea. A conversation. A garden. A book. A beer ? A joke that has nothing to do with the news. A walk where nobody is explaining the world to you.
Because the point is not to withdraw from reality. It is to remain sovereign within it.
The world is already loud enough. We don’t need less knowledge. We need the adulthood to decide what gets to live inside our heads.
Limhachan Kikon
Duncan Bosti
Dimapur
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