People who have taken it upon themselves to voice their opinions about these sorts of things might like to classify the time we’re living in right now as having already gone beyond the information era, but in truth, whatever they may refer to it as, the era we’ll continue to live in remains that of the information era. Social media is an iteration of only a small cog forming part of the greater information era, for instance, so too what appears to be the increasingly individualised nature of the manner through which we seem to want to live our lives.

However, what does it really mean to live in the information era? What are the pitfalls of this most documented era in history and what are its advantages? How can you make sure to enjoy a fruitful, productive, balanced and generally happy life in this information era?

Information is power and knowledge is freedom

Let’s face it; as much as we might hate to have to admit it, success in this day and age is associated with money. To that effect, when you look at some of the most successful people in the world, a lot of their success is derived from the knowledge they use to apply information which is in essence available to all of us. If some Silicon Valley start-up founder goes on to build a multi-billion dollar app, for instance, whether they’re self-taught or they went to college to learn how to code, essentially anyone else can follow their path, learn how to code and then also go on to create something that generates billions in revenue.

That’s where the difference lies. Information is freely available, depending on how you go about acquiring it, but it’s those with the knowledge of how to apply that information intelligently who get ahead.

Learn how to apply all this information which is so cheaply available, if not completely freely available in some or other way.

Learning to avoid information overload

Unfortunately we tend to be focussing a bit too much on the social media aspect of the information era in which we’re living, which gives rise to phrases such as the social media generation. Between social networks and all the other modern day information channels, information overload is a very real threat to the quality of our lives.

We need to learn how to separate the valuable information we can constructively use to better our lives from useless information which is fed to us in the name of “entertainment.”

Deploying the essentialist approach to handling information

Valuable information can make for some very valuable currency with which to effectively trade for anything that can improve the quality of your life, for example, if I know of what is effectively the best personal injury attorney Los Angeles has on offer, if I relay that information to someone who goes on to use it and lands a mega claim compensation payout, in some small way they’ll feel as if they owe me something of equal value.