It's all just too much
There's far more written every day than will ever be read. We write and create for the entire world but not for anyone in particular. We consume what washes over us, never knowing what's next, where it's going.
If, like me, you came of age alongside early Internet adoption, you remember a time when it seemed almost manageable. If the world stopped creating, if the search engines stopped adding pages, you could catch up eventually. If everything slowed down, given enough time, maybe you could build a roughly accurate mental model of what's out there, of the idea space.
But we have slow boiled. Catching up is meaningless, impossible, childlike. It's counting grains of sand on a beach as the waves endlessly shape it.
Turns out the information world isn't just enormous—it isn't flat. You couldn't map it even on a page that grew forever. And suppose you circumnavigated it and come back to where you started; would it even be the same place? There's no fixed point, no home.
Modern thinking is now predicated on dynamism. We are expected to anticipate that today's ideas will crumble, erode. That the landscape changes underfoot.
Yet some of us carry a ghost of that nagging feeling that maybe there's an end. We started at three or twelve or thirty six channels. Then hundreds. But then channels stopped being the unit of measure. We had thousands of books in our local library, and millions searchable on a computer. Then books stopped being the unit of measure too.
There is no catching up. There never was, really.
Cling to what you love. Let it all go. Either is ok. Both are ok.