Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. — Gertrude Stein

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

Author: Gertrude Stein

Insight: We live inside a constant stream of information now—notifications, headlines, expert opinions, conflicting studies, social media takes—and somewhere in all that noise, we've stopped trusting our own eyes and experience. You notice something off about a friend but a wellness app tells you to ignore it. You feel tired after doom-scrolling but an article explains why that's actually fine. We've been trained to second-guess our instincts in favor of what we've read. The tricky part is that information itself isn't the enemy. The problem is volume combined with the assumption that more data always leads to better judgment. It doesn't. When you're drowning in options, studies, and opinions, your ability to notice what's actually happening right in front of you gets buried. Common sense—that felt sense of what makes sense given your specific situation—gets crowded out. The reset doesn't mean rejecting information. It means protecting quiet time where you notice things without immediately looking them up. It means occasionally trusting what you've learned from living instead of what you've just consumed. The clearest thinking often comes from sitting with fewer inputs, not more.