In a bit of frustration recently, I thought about how much information I plow through each day and posted this tweet:

After thinking about that conundrum some more, I drew a graph like the one on the right on my whiteboard.  

As the available information in the world continues to expand geometrically, we are constrained by an absolutely finite resource – time.  To my knowledge, nobody’s days have grown longer recently.  Yet the amount of information we have at our disposal continues to tend towards infinity.

Big data analytics certainly attempts to deal with this challenge.  Ever more sophisticated tools sift through larger and larger piles of data, attempting to discover “Subtle Patterns and Relationships” that may have importance in our lives.

It as if we are attempting to grasp and understand the infinite from a finite frame of reference.

It reminded me of a profound statement from a very wise man: David O. McKay

Spirituality, our true aim, is the consciousness of victory over self and of communion with the Infinite. 

I doubt that the Infinite of which he spoke will be found in the near infinite pile of data in Facebook or Twitter, but it is food for thought.