Blissful Ignorance

The older I get the happier I am to remain blissfully ignorant of certain things. This does not (I hope) include the very important things out there in the world, for there are surely issues and events both personal and public which we should naturally fret about. 

What I'm really concerned about is this: there's too much information out there, and the bulk of it is useless. It's time wasting and simply unnecessary to know. 

In the first place, human beings are quite able, indeed very ready and willing, to fritter away their lives as it is. Add in the tidal wave of information great and trivial which the modern world lays at our feet through the Internet and Twitter and Instagram and a great many other grams and we become, as the meme says, prisoners of our own device. We rarely if ever ask to what end.

What brought this little diatribe on is my own sloth. Rather than check what might actually be important emails this morning, or even seeing to the relatively minor act of getting on with a new blog, I clicked on a link to a piece about the 20 Beatles songs John Lennon hated. On hitting the third item (and corollary explanation) on the list I thought, "Why should I care which songs Lennon hated?"

I suppose that arguably it wasn't entirely a useless read, as it obviously led to my actually offering a new STTR this morning. Still, so Lennon hated some of the songs he wrote and performed. Big whoop. I can live a perfectly decent life without holding such thin knowledge. 

Bishop Fulton Sheen once said that ignorance is better than error. While he meant that for a greater cause than what I'm quoting him today, it still fits. It's okay to be ignorant of what doesn't mean beans in the first place.