My phone buzzed at 3 AM last night. A news alert. Something happening in a country I’ve never visited. People I’ll never meet. A problem I can’t solve.

I read it anyway. Then I couldn’t sleep.

This happens every night now. My brain carries the weight of the whole world. Wars. Elections. Scandals. Climate reports. Stock markets. Celebrity divorces. Medical studies that say coffee is good, then bad, then good again.

I know more about strangers on the other side of the earth than I know about my neighbor. I know more about distant conflicts than I know about my own heart.

Something is wrong here.

My grandmother knew very little. She knew her village. Her family. Her recipes. The names of plants in her garden. The timing of seasons. That was her world. Small. Complete. Understood.

I know everything. And I understand nothing.

This is the strange sickness of our time. We have access to all the knowledge in human history. It sits in our pockets. We can look up anything. Learn anything. Know anything.

But wisdom? Wisdom feels further away than ever.

I listen to podcasts on my commute. “Get smarter in fifteen minutes.” I read newsletters that explain world politics in bullet points. I watch videos that teach quantum physics while I brush my teeth.

Information piles up in my head like sediment. Layer upon layer. Never settling into anything solid.

I can recite statistics about happiness. I don’t know how to be happy. I know the chemical formula for tears. I don’t know why I cry sometimes for no reason. I understand how love works in the brain. I still can’t figure out why some relationships fail.

Knowing is not understanding. I learned this too late.

My browser has forty-seven tabs open right now. Articles I started but didn’t finish. Videos I saved for later. Forums where strangers argue about meaning with the confidence of people who have never doubted themselves.

Each tab promises something. An answer. A revelation. A truth that will finally make sense of everything.

None of them deliver. They just open more questions. More tabs. More noise.

At dinner parties, we talk about complicated things. International conflicts. Economic policies. Climate science. We sound so informed. We have opinions about everything. We’ve read articles. We’ve seen documentaries. We’ve scrolled through expert threads.

But something is missing. The talking sounds hollow. Facts fly around the room but never land anywhere. Information moves from mouth to mouth but wisdom sits silent in the corner.

We know so much. We understand so little.

I lie in bed at night, and my head won’t stop. News about people I’ll never meet. Problems I can’t fix. Injustices that make me angry but leave me helpless. My brain processes breaking news from three continents while my body tries to sleep.

The ancient part of my brain—the part that was designed to remember where berries grew and which shadows meant danger—now carries the troubles of seven billion strangers.

It wasn’t built for this. None of us were.

There’s a quiet voice inside. Call it intuition. Call it wisdom. Call it whatever you want. It used to guide decisions. It used to know things without being told.

That voice is drowning now. Drowning in notifications. In updates. In alerts. In the endless stream of new information that never stops flowing.

I can’t hear it anymore. The noise is too loud.

My phone knows everything about me. When I sleep. Where I go. What I buy. What I click. What I read. It predicts what I’ll want before I want it.

But it can’t tell me why I feel empty. Why, after a day of consuming more information than my great-grandparents saw in a year, I feel hungry for something I can’t name.

Algorithms learn my preferences. They can’t teach me my purpose.

We are the most informed generation in history. We are also the most confused. We swim in an ocean of data while dying of thirst for meaning.

The question used to be: What does this mean?

Now the question is: What’s new? What’s next? What’s trending?

Meaning takes time. It grows slowly, like fruit ripening in darkness. Information demands speed. Instant consumption. Constant updating. No time to digest. No time to understand. Just more. Always more.

I deleted some apps last week. Turned off some notifications. It helped a little. The quiet felt strange at first. Uncomfortable. Like a room that’s too silent after years of background noise.

But in that quiet, something returned. The voice I couldn’t hear. The thinking that wasn’t reacting. The knowing that doesn’t need articles to confirm itself.

My grandmother didn’t need podcasts to be wise. She watched seasons change. She noticed things. She sat with thoughts until they became understanding. She had time.

We don’t have time. Or we think we don’t. We’re too busy knowing everything to understand anything.

I talked to an old man last month. He doesn’t own a smartphone. He reads one newspaper. Slowly. He finishes it before starting anything else.

“Aren’t you afraid of missing things?” I asked.

He smiled. “What things?”

I didn’t have an answer.

He knows less than me. He understands more. He sleeps well at night. His head isn’t full of other people’s emergencies. His attention isn’t scattered across forty-seven tabs.

I envied him. Still do.

Maybe wisdom isn’t about knowing more. Maybe it’s about knowing what to ignore. What to let go. What to leave unread, unwatched, unconsumed.

Maybe the ancient humans had it right. Know your village. Know your people. Know your seasons. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.

We can’t go back, of course. The noise is here. The information keeps coming. The alerts keep buzzing. The world keeps demanding our attention for things we can’t control.

But maybe we can create small silences. Tiny spaces where knowing stops and understanding begins.

I’m trying. Failing mostly. But trying.

Last night, I didn’t check my phone before bed. I just lay there. Thinking. Slowly. About nothing in particular.

It felt strange. Almost wrong. Like I was missing something important.

Maybe I was missing noise.

Maybe that’s okay.

The world will keep spinning whether I know about it or not. The problems will exist whether I read about them or not. The information will flow whether I consume it or not.

But my understanding—that grows only in quiet. Only in time. Only when I stop knowing long enough to start understanding.

My grandmother knew this without anyone teaching her.

I’m learning it the hard way.

One notification at a time. One silence at a time.

When knowing becomes noise, the only wisdom is knowing when to stop.