Information overload (which is also known as infobesity or infoxication) refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information.

Ever have so many things to do in one day that once you've made a list and are about to get started, you realize you forgot your keys in your room? Or perhaps your car? Maybe to blow off steam after completing your list you went to workout to find that you forgot your headphones. No matter the situation, when your life is moving at a million miles an hour, some things tend to get left behind. The "haste makes waste," truism makes itself abundantly clear, to your slightly more than mild irritation.

These things are the symptoms of something called information overload. Your magnificent brain, capable of memorizing all of the lyrics to that local ad jingle you don't want to remember, and none of the class that your test next week is in. Unfortunately, this wonderful organ has a capacity of things that it can hold on to at one time, and do effectively. One. There is increasing research to suggest that true multitasking doesn't actually exist. And unfortunately, when you don't take the time to give your full attention to what you're doing in the moment, or instead find yourself saturated with too much information, multi-tasking is what you're doing.

However, that is not the point I'm trying to make. We've all probably heard at some point the perils of multi-tasking in some form or other. The point I'm trying to make is that while we're busying ourselves absorbing as much information as we can, then de-stressing our lives, then not getting as much sleep as we should, then doing it all again, we've missed a couple things. Things that should really piss us off.

I'd like to start this explanation with a parable about my experience with social media. My middle school self always wanted to ask the "popular" kids was, how do they find all these funny, ridiculous or painful YouTube videos and effectively start a new fad, and with it a new barrage of inside jokes that I always found myself outside of? Today, I find myself in a similar position, and in fact coined the term "meta-comedian" to some of my friends to describe my process of observing when certain jokes are made and how, then repeating them in similar scenarios. I don't actually know what I'm referencing, but everyone else does, and I didn't mess up the timing so no one is the wiser.

Many times I've wondered why this is. Was I simply born without the ability to foresee fads until they were mostly on their way out? Or was it because they had older siblings that showed them what was cool for them and there was this trickle down effect? One piece of advice I received, and still receive today is, "You just think about it too much. It just sorta is man." Unfortunately for me, thinking too much is simply what I do, so I had to keep asking why.

The common trend that I ran across was that growing up, I never had a TV in my room, and spent most of my time outside, in music lessons, or reading. The only people who had access to a computer in the house until I was in 4th grade were my parents. All my friends were already emailing, and instant messaging each other. All my friends were playing the newest games on N64, then GameCube, then Xbox, then Xbox 360. All my friends stayed up until 12 watching their favorite shows whenever. Instead, I was staying up until 4 reading a book I just couldn't put down, or sneaking outside to stargaze. I was understandably salty for all this at the time.

Now I see the hidden benefit behind my social network ineptitude. By no means do I want to seem superior for having read instead of watching TV. Or stargazing instead of gaming. But there is one thing that is undeniable about both of those things; they're slow.

While I am a fast reader (only because I've done it a lot), I can only read as fast as I can retain information. TV, games, movies, news broadcasts, they all have external pacing, that is, they don't ask you if you're keeping up. At this point, you may be asking yourself why you should care, and what this has to do with the title of this article. Well thank you for asking.

Let me answer the implied question with another question. If you had a friend that would join a club on campus, talk about it non-stop for a week, then simply move on, join a new club, and talk about that one non-stop, continuing ad nauseum, how would you react? I know that my reaction would be to show the prerequisite amount of interest for about a day, then silently ache for them to shut up, focus on one thing and actually do something in that club, rather than pretending to care about many things that sound good to others. Investigated a little further my reaction would be the realization that this friend of mine has been removed from his core, needs to re-identify his values, and actually do something with them.

This leads to the next point, regarding our generation's attitude and tendencies toward news and information. In an analysis of why people share what they share on social media, buzzsumo.com identifies the characteristics of top shared articles. While that article itself is a compelling read, I'd humbly encourage you to look at the final sentence of each of these ingredients for maximum sharing, "Click to Tweet." Now that's what I call irony. (And yes I do see the irony in then sharing this story on Facebook. No way around it I'm afraid.)

This is all well and good but again why do you care? Because look at how much information is being passed over the internet. Zettabyte. That's the number of space on a standard computer hard drive multiplied by 20,000,000,000 or for those that don't want to count the zeros, 20 trillion. In one year. That is simply an inconceivable amount of information constantly being linked, shared, and disseminated. There's no way any one person can take all that in. So the question becomes, what exactly have we as a society missed?

As it turns out, not much. Interestingly enough I went into this article extremely cynically, thinking that I would see constant references to celebrity lives that don't matter, the Jenner person's sex change, or any number of things that frankly seem trivial. I was pleasantly surprised when looking over multiple news sites most popular tabs, finding meaningful, well-researched articles dominating the content for the week. So why am I bringing all this up?

Well, since I've established that we're not very good at holding on to LOTS of information at a time, our wonderful brain has figured out another way. Forget everything that's too old. That's right. We share things, we get mad about them, we call for reform, but no one is actually going to do anything about any of these articles because the time it takes to change policy vs. our attention span for enacting that change is different by complete orders of magnitude. And even when some people care about issues enough to actually remember them, most simply don't. John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight on HBO(think British version of Colbert Report) had an amazing, if lengthy video detailing this phenomenon with the Snowden controversy here.

Nobody remembered who Edward Snowden was, or at best, thought he was the WikiLeaks guy. That is terrible for multiple reasons, mainly, we all should have been up in arms around that controversy. I don't care which side you agree with but if you weren't mad, I don't think you were paying attention. Instead, major news corporations saturate our day to day lives with a combination of news-worthy news, frivolous feel-good stories, celebrities we really shouldn't care about, and science that they end up butchering. And since most of the time we're to busy with our lives to do any research on our own, we don't even see the news that these companies didn't deem worthy of sharing.

Then you log on to Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or whatever, and you see a quiz, followed by a cat video, then "You won't believe what happens next!!" Oh I believe I will. We'll forget.

We won't remember a thing. The things that used to bother us are simply washed down the creek, forgotten because it's more effort to remember them. Carried away and abandoned.

So what are some of the things that we've forgotten about? The fact that all the issues from the Arab Spring haven't gone away. The implications of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Facebook actively manipulated us. Rolling Stone lied. This interesting tidbit of retroactive information doctoring. And all this is just since 2010. I hope it makes you wonder what else has passed by, not without noticing but without stopping to appreciate the gravity of it.

Now that you're thinking, I'll instead address why I care. Why I went through the trouble to find these articles and write this one. I want the whole world to get mad. I mean really angry.

Myself and my peers are in college, just entering, or recently graduated. We've seen stories that will haunt us for the rest of our lives in terms of the horror that is being wrought in the world. And we haven't done anything. We're supposed to be the revolutionaries, the idealists, the ones with enough energy to start a revolution. To quote Jack London, "I'd rather be ashes than dust!" Don't decay away, don't let this life pass you by, don't take the abuse laying down. Fight for what you believe, but first decide what you believe. Believe in something, anything! Then start a revolution, rebel against what you were told, find out for yourself, and burn yourself out if you have to. Just to change it, whatever your "it" is.

That's why I want the world angry. There's a whole lot wrong, but we become enablers if we don't do anything about it. If you want to be young, wild, AND free remember the immortal words of Dylan Thomas,

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

We're always on the edge of death, as that is the cost of truly living. Don't grieve the sun on it's way, smile at what you did under it's light.

What will your revolution be?