If you’re like me, you’re an informavore with FOMO—and you need help.

By Steve Sampson

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When I was a small child, my mother told me, “Someday, you’re going to be an absent-minded professor.”

She also told me, “You’d lose your own head if it wasn’t attached.”

She had a point. I lost shinguards during soccer practice. I lost a five-dollar bill between my house and the one next door. I lost the signed permission slips for three out of four of my second-grade field trips. No kidding.

Things improved as I got older, but only a bit. In 10th grade, I forgot to complete a semester-long project on the Greek and Latin roots of words, even though I’ve always been fascinated by etymology.

“I’m stunned,” said my English teacher. “You’re the only student I have who’s actually interested in this stuff.”

“I didn’t mean to not do it,” I said with a shrug. “I just forgot.”

She shook her head and gave me a makeup assignment (an early lesson for me in word-nerd solidarity).

In college, I couldn’t decide on a major for years and eventually wound up with two. For graduate school, I chose an interdisciplinary program that let me roam across Rhetoric, Cultural History, Shakespeare, and Cognitive Science.

The last of these led me to the work of Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher who wrote books on cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. In Dennett’s work, I found a word that fit me perfectly: “informavore.”

We’re Informavores with FOMO, People

According to Dennett, all humans are informavores—creatures who constantly seek out and consume information, much like we constantly seek out and consume food. The reason is straightforward: like food, information sustains us and always has.

Consuming information is primordial, instinctual, and habitual for us—and by nature, we aren’t very picky about what we take in. We are “informavorous.”

But there’s more to it than that. We’re also driven by something I’d call informational FOMO—the fear of missing out on information.

As the deeply social animals we are, we often worry that we’re missing out on something, and we loathe being last to know. We want to be in on the latest, greatest, juiciest information—even if keeping up is costly and (objectively) not that important for our flourishing.

If my mother were still around today, that would be my excuse for losing so much stuff as a child: I was always an informavore with FOMO, seeking constantly to understand and to stay in the social loop.

I still am. And so are you, dear reader, even if you have better focusing skills than I do.

When Information Becomes the Enemy

Until recently, being informavores with FOMO mostly worked out well for us humans. It drove us to create the most sophisticated information-processing tools the world has ever seen, and we used those tools to spread across the face of the earth.

As a species, we created science and technology, art and culture, literature and organized religion. We harnessed electricity, then radio waves. We built a worldwide web of information and communication.

But now, the landscape has shifted.

The information that was supposed to set us free now overwhelms us. And our fear of missing out now drives us apart. What was once billed as information’s golden age is looking more like the heyday of bullshit.

Misinformation and disinformation are winning. Fake news corrupts friendships and sows distrust. And the algorithms that control our feeds are sucking up our data and learning to manipulate us a little better every day.

Meanwhile, we’re lost in our inboxes—with a dozen tabs still open on our browsers, with Instagram pinging and Twitter (or X?) tweeting, and Zoom calls every half hour.

We’re perpetually double-booking and rescheduling. We’re lying to ourselves about multitasking, then doing it to one another anyway. We’re collectively optimizing for ineffectual busyness. And we’re all desperate for respite.

Burnout is soaring. Mental health is crashing. Loneliness is the latest pandemic.

Being “informavorous” no longer serves us well because information alone is no longer our friend. It’s a bit like sugar or calories: Our ancestors once needed more of it, but now we have too much—at least those of us with ready access to it.

What we need now isn’t more information; it’s more and better filtering. It’s more and better truth telling. It’s thoughtful consumption that creates more shared understanding.

We need what Yuval Noah Harari calls “strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth-telling.” More than that, we need to become strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth-telling.

We need to become informavores with better sources, sharper minds, and more time to think creatively and constructively. And we need to start today.

How to Tame Your Internal Informavore

Here are some ideas for getting started.  

1. The Information Diet Challenge

For the next week, limit yourself to one trusted news source per day—whether it’s a particular website, newsletter, or podcast.

At the end of the week, reflect:

• What did you miss?
• What did you gain by filtering your intake?
• Did you feel less overwhelmed or more focused?

2. The Essential Point Filter

Choose a topic you care about. Spend one hour gathering information about it. Your goal: Identify and write down only the three most important insights you discovered.

Now, cut the three insights down to just one sentence each. How short and clear can you make them without losing their essence?

Record your insights in a notebook, preferably one made of paper. Feel free to share them with others, but keep them for yourself in any case.

3. A Study in Self-Correction

Identify one source of information you use regularly. Ask yourself:

• How do they establish credibility?
• What mechanisms do they use to ensure accuracy?
• How transparent are they about their methods and biases?
• What practices can you adopt to improve your own truth-seeking process?

Bottom-Line Takeaway

Information is not your friend. Not by default. Not anymore. The challenge now is not to consume more information, but to filter it better—to shape it into something that serves you and others, rather than overwhelming us all.