TMI

If you ever find yourself at the very beginning of a long, slow, year-long train wreck, my advice to you is to not spend your hours researching train wrecks on the web.  There is so much information out there about how badly trains can wreck, and what the precise trajectory of most derailments are, and how many survivors can be expected (depending on how fast the train was going and what the weather conditions are), and whether people sitting in the front of the train are more likely to have their heads severed as opposed to suffering spinal compression and be paralyzed for life.

You can read all the stories about people who survived train wrecks, and also people who blame the train industry in general for their lack of safety and protocols. You can read about people who never go on trains for this very reason, and then you can change to reading about car wrecks and roller blade accidents and how many former train riders are implicated in those.

In short:  too much information.  Knowledge is power.  And yet, really, do I want to know how prevalent depression is after a train wreck?  Or how radically life expectancy is liable to change?  Do we really really want to know these things?

The other day I wrote that we freak out because of our need to have an illusion of control. We also believe that researching everything will also give us control.  These days it becomes utterly addictive to learn, and research, and browse.

It's totally depressing. And yet, even as I'm writing this I found myself branching off and researching online web sites that help you determine which adjuvant therapies are best suited for you.  I completely advise against it, even as I do it.


Insidious. Maybe knowledge is not power after all.  Maybe knowledge is just the illusion of control.