Sometimes I open WhatsApp and find dozens of forwarded messages piling up every day in groups I can no longer remember when I joined.<\/p>\n
Some I joined willingly; others somehow found their way to me without my intending it.<\/p>\n
They cover every imaginable subject: politics, economics, health, religion, proverbs, stories, and words of wisdom.<\/p>\n
All of them are \u201cimportant.\u201d
\nAll of them \u201cmust be read.\u201d
\nAnd all of them arrive with the same sense of urgency.<\/p>\n
At first, I opened them one by one.<\/p>\n
Then I began scrolling through them quickly.<\/p>\n
Then I started ignoring most of them.<\/p>\n
Today, I feel that their sheer abundance has itself diminished their value.<\/p>\n
This is not merely a technological problem. It is a profound cultural phenomenon.<\/p>\n
Excessive abundance produces the opposite of what we might expect.<\/strong><\/p>\n Instead of increasing our knowledge, it scatters our attention.<\/p>\n Instead of giving us better choices, it makes it harder to distinguish among them.<\/p>\n The precious becomes buried beneath mountains of repetition, and the reader struggles to know when to stop, what deserves their time, and what can be passed over without regret.<\/p>\n Repetition itself erodes meaning.<\/p>\n An idea that provoked reflection the first time becomes, by the tenth, nothing more than familiar noise.<\/p>\n A text that has been forwarded dozens of times loses its freshness, even if the original was worthwhile.<\/p>\n Over time, the mind becomes accustomed to moving quickly from one thing to another. It no longer pauses before what is actually worth pausing for.<\/p>\n Here lies the paradox:<\/p>\n We live in an age that gives us access to an enormous quantity of ideas, yet our ability to extract value from them is declining.<\/strong><\/p>\n Because value does not come from quantity.<\/p>\n It comes from selection.<\/p>\n And selection requires time, calm, and awareness\u2014things that have become scarce in a world of messages flowing endlessly into our lives.<\/p>\n The problem is not limited to WhatsApp.<\/p>\n It reflects a much broader condition in public discourse.<\/p>\n When everything becomes easily available, many things lose their weight.<\/p>\n And when the valuable and the trivial become equally accessible, with the same speed and immediacy, it becomes difficult for the mind to establish a hierarchy of priorities.<\/p>\n The reader gradually transforms from a seeker of meaning into a consumer of content, and from a contemplative thinker into a scroller.<\/p>\n Perhaps the solution is not to withdraw completely, but to rediscover the art of choosing.<\/p>\n To ask ourselves before opening a message:<\/p>\n Is this worth a few minutes of my life?<\/strong><\/p>\n And to give ourselves permission to ignore most of what reaches us without feeling guilty about it.<\/p>\n True value is not lost because we failed to read everything.<\/p>\n It is lost when we lose the ability to recognize what is worth reading<\/strong>.<\/p>\n In an age of abundance, restraint becomes an ethical position<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And conscious choice may be the last form of control we have over what enters our minds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes I open WhatsApp and find dozens of forwarded messages piling up every day in groups I can no longer remember when I joined. Some I joined willingly; others somehow found their way to me without my intending it. They cover every imaginable subject: politics, economics, health, religion, proverbs, stories, and words of wisdom. All …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14029,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[280,103,16,197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-collective-activities-articles","category-all-articles","category-articles-by-dr-badrawi","category-translated-articles"],"yoast_head":"\n