People Have More Information About Themselves Available Than Ever. Self-Understanding Didn't Improve at the Same Rate.
By nearly any measure, people today have access to more information about themselves than any previous generation — step counts, sleep data, spending records, message histories, years of searchable digital activity. Self-understanding, measured by how well people actually recognize their own recurring patterns, has not improved at anything close to the same rate.
This gap is instructive: data volume and understanding were never the same variable, and increasing one doesn't automatically increase the other. A thousand data points about behavior, uncollated and unreviewed, contain the same information as one data point that's actually been examined for a pattern — which is to say, none, until someone or something does the examining.
The bottleneck was never data scarcity. Modern life produces an enormous, continuously growing record of behavior. The bottleneck is that almost nothing exists whose job is to take that record and actually look at it for what keeps recurring — collection happens automatically; examination does not.
More data was supposed to mean more self-knowledge, and mostly hasn't, because data and knowledge require an intermediate step — attention, applied specifically to finding the pattern — that no amount of raw collection supplies on its own.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai