Sep 21, 2026 · 48 min · 13 segments
We live in an age overflowing with information. Answers are always within reach, and with a few taps, we can know almost anything. But does having more information actually make us wiser? In this…
Pepper SweeneyHost
Yeah, I don't want to keep that thought, but I just want to say, you know, how often have you been in a room and you're having a conversation and, you know, somebody poses a question and instead of grappling and finding the answer, somebody inevitably reaches for their phone and looks it up on Google to get that immediate answer.
And so there is this sense in which to become people of information, right? Knowledge itself still kept us somewhat more, it kept us tied to the material world.
But with the dawn of the information age, I become increasingly separate even from my own body.
Yeah,
the idea that, you know, now that we have teenagers who are in, you know, in those schools where you can still have your cell phone, like they're uncomfortable actually having a face-to-face conversation with somebody.
And you might say, well, I can't actually be, you know, have an encounter with somebody else's body.
Well, the problem with that is that I get distressed and it's me that I'm having the problem with.
I remember when COVID wrapped up and we went, we returned to running our confessional communities in our practice.
We kind of, we came back into person in the very first night that we met, there was a group that had been meeting for three or four or five years, maybe even before COVID.
And then they, the same group that had been in person at one point comes back in person in the very first night.
One of the folks said like, I'm just, I'm finding myself just to be very uncomfortable.
So one of the things that information, the information age has done, it's not just cut me off from other people, it cuts me off myself.
I had a conversation with a with a surgeon who was on the faculty at a major training hospital.
And, and he was he was decrying his concern about how the surgeons that were coming up under his care.
This is a well known program, the country, these guys do like serious trauma work and so forth.
Yeah, I don't want to keep that thought, but I just want to say, you know, how often have you been in a room and you're having a conversation and, you know, somebody poses a question and instead of grappling and finding the answer, somebody inevitably reaches for their phone and looks it up on Google to get that immediate answer.
And so there is this sense in which to become people of information, right? Knowledge itself still kept us somewhat more, it kept us tied to the material world.
But with the dawn of the information age, I become increasingly separate even from my own body.
Yeah,
the idea that, you know, now that we have teenagers who are in, you know, in those schools where you can still have your cell phone, like they're uncomfortable actually having a face-to-face conversation with somebody.
And you might say, well, I can't actually be, you know, have an encounter with somebody else's body.
Well, the problem with that is that I get distressed and it's me that I'm having the problem with.
I remember when COVID wrapped up and we went, we returned to running our confessional communities in our practice.
We kind of, we came back into person in the very first night that we met, there was a group that had been meeting for three or four or five years, maybe even before COVID.
And then they, the same group that had been in person at one point comes back in person in the very first night.
One of the folks said like, I'm just, I'm finding myself just to be very uncomfortable.
So one of the things that information, the information age has done, it's not just cut me off from other people, it cuts me off myself.
I had a conversation with a with a surgeon who was on the faculty at a major training hospital.
And, and he was he was decrying his concern about how the surgeons that were coming up under his care.
This is a well known program, the country, these guys do like serious trauma work and so forth.
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