The Cost of Knowledge

Silence.

I catch myself doing it without thinking. Grabbing my phone. Opening email, X, LinkedIn - sometimes just the news. No purpose. No intent. Just a small dopamine hit to keep my brain occupied.

It feels like a reflex.

I’ve gotten good at it.

Scrolling while my kid tells me about his day, excited to see me after school. While waiting at red lights behind the wheel. In the cinema when everyone else is watching the film. At Xmas dinner, surrounded by family I see twice a year.

I feel ashamed writing this. But I’m grateful.

The obvious costs are easy to name. Disconnection from the people in front of you. Tired eyes. Fractured attention. The guilt that hums underneath everything.

The hidden cost - the moment you accept signal, you stop creating signal.

When your brain operates in constant receiving mode, it thinks it’s creating. But it’s recycling. Remixing the inputs. Reacting to whatever the feed served up that morning.

We say we’re thinking but we’re mostly processing.

They told us - surround yourself with brilliant people and you’ll become brilliant too. Fair enough. But now we surround ourselves with them ten hours a day through screens. Americans spend over 60% of their waking hours consuming content.

At that ratio, how could you possibly know what you actually think?

The world tells you what the standards are. What success looks like. What’s right and wrong. How to build, how to compete, who to measure yourself against. Why to measure. And your beliefs form around those signals - inevitably. You don’t notice it happening because it feels like your own thinking.

But it isn’t.

It’s inherited. Absorbed. Recycled.

And this is why most businesses look the same. Most brands sound the same. Most strategies follow the same playbook. Everyone’s reading the same feeds, absorbing the same frameworks, reacting to the same signals. The output converges because the input is identical.

Real differentiation comes from seeing something others don’t. And you can’t see what others don’t if you’re looking where everyone else is looking.

The breakthroughs - in business, in art, in life - come from people who found a way to stop the signal long enough to hear their own.

I’ve spent years in design. It’s my adult life. My edge. My way of seeing the world.

It’s also my cage.

My brain has been shaped in ways that aren’t easy to change. That shaping gave me something - a kind of force. But the same force that pushes me forward also holds me back. I see every problem through the same lens. I reach for the same tools.

Knowledge can become a golden cage. It makes you efficient at things you should probably question.

The only way I’ve found to escape it - even briefly - is to stop the signal entirely. To sit in silence long enough that my own thoughts have room to surface.

Not the recycled ones. The real ones.

Silence is uncomfortable.

Your brain fights it. It reaches for the boost - anything to avoid being alone with itself.

That discomfort is the point.

On the other side of it is something you can’t get any other way: your own voice, ideas, purpose, goals. Your own judgment. Ideas that didn’t come from someone else’s feed.

AI models are built on other people’s knowledge. They remix. They react. They predict the next word based on patterns they’ve absorbed.

The one thing they can’t do is originate from silence.

You can.

I’m not telling you to delete your apps or move to a cabin. I’m not even telling you to meditate.

But notice.

Notice when you reach for the phone. Notice when the input is filling space that could hold something else - or maybe nothing. Notice what happens when you let yourself be bored.

And when you can, turn the device off. Stare at a wall for five minutes. Feel your heartbeat. Smell the air.

Have a conversation with your younger self - the one who hadn’t absorbed all these signals yet. Ask them what they wanted before they learned what they were supposed to want.

Then see what comes up when no one else is talking.

That’s where the good stuff lives.

Now turn this device off.