-Essay-
BUENOS AIRES — When we finally realize that our obsessive accumulation of data is not wisdom, critical judgment becomes more urgent than ever. It is essential to analyze the massive amount of information at our disposal and, just as importantly, to exercise the restraint to decide what is worth using.
We live immersed in an increasingly tired state, inhabiting what we now euphemistically call an aestheticized, stylized fatigue. In reality, this state is the consequence of a life we naively imagine to be happy, tolerable, or even desirable — a life devoted to providing for ourselves and, above all, for others, with the efficiency, performance, productivity and profitability that we are told constitute the only kind of happiness worth pursuing.
Yet this is not the fatigue that comes from effort, as it did in the past. It comes from an almost overwhelming saturation. The digital world promises freedom but delivers a quiet servitude, an indirect form of slavery: the “free obligation” to consume everything, the true imperative we submit to without question, encoding in it the only morality deemed worthy of consideration.
In a world of hyper-information, the idea that consuming will set you free is an illusory truth — real freedom today does not come from accessing more, but from knowing what to give up. We must learn to recognize what we do not need to know.
Judgment as an anchor
As Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity points out, this is paradoxically the most valuable knowledge we can seek: the only form of resistance to the algorithmic colonization of our attention, because attention is life, and whoever captures it captures our existence.
Although Bauman’s “liquid society” promised fluidity in the grandest terms, it delivered little beyond the dissolution of vital structures: identities, certainties, bonds. In this constant flow, judgment becomes an anchor.
Critical judgment is a lifeline. It is not about rejecting technology, but about regaining control over our senses. A cognitive, emotional, and sensory diet is not deprivation; it is a safe path toward a dignity that is still recoverable.
Every ‘no’
Sobriety and austerity may sound outdated in a time of seemingly infinite abundance, but they are among the most revolutionary practices we can adopt. Every “no” we say to the screens becomes a “yes” to contemplation, silence and solitude. It removes the deafening distance that prevents genuine encounter with oneself and, above all, with others.
Silence is now a radical political act.
In this way, and although it may seem merely aesthetic or spiritual, silence is now a radical political act, and disconnection a gesture of lucidity. We do not need to know everything to live fully. In fact, a full life may require very little information; it demands instead the ability to discern, to choose, and to renounce.
In informational restraint lies the richness of thought. Only those who learn to step back and close their eyes can truly see. Only those who discover that freedom is not found in endless navigation but in a deliberate running aground to inhabit a world where we have the courage to ask not what information to consume, but what part of ourselves we are willing not to sell.