The Internet is a tidbit machine, bristling with fun facts, twenty bests, lists. As in a Turkish souk, one’s attention is incessantly enticed by baited hooks. Content providers, like hookers, grow deft at dangling their wares. I’m hardly proof against their wiles, especially when tired or paused. Do I really want to know what Jackie O’s granddaughter is worth? I didn’t know Caroline had a daughter (she’s got two: Tatiana and Rose). Older or younger than mine, I wonder. And so forth.

The problem with tidbits, as any parent or dog-owner knows, is they spoil your appetite for dinner, stuffing without nourishing, inducing bloat and gas. Chips, comestible or comprehensible, may be yummy, but oy! Take them away!

The Internet has to be a tidbit machine because it makes its money by flirting. Internet winners snag eyeballs. The more you snag, the richer you get. Fourteen-year-olds making funny faces become “influencers” to the pimple crowd. Eating healthy costs more and takes longer. Snack away, dude.

So what, some might ask. Are a few extra chips such a big deal? Don’t we learn stuff online we’d never have known? So what if it’s not worth knowing – why be such a stick!

Forty years ago, copywriters at Young and Rubicam, the ad agency, coined this catchphrase for the United Negro College Fund: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Right they were. Our minds are unicameral: they can only think one thing at a time. Multi-tasking, though it may feel like simultaneous cerebrations, is really rapid toggling of attention.

Whatever I’m thinking displaces what I might have been thinking. Jackie O’s granddaughter has displaced Kierkegaard. Who needs Kierkegaard? Fair enough: who needs thought of any sort?

It’s unclear that thinking has benefitted our species. Humans have been writing for less than three thousand years, an eyeblink in eternity. You can’t think without writing because you can’t retain or transmit your thoughts. Writing gave humans an edge over other creatures. Humans thought up cities and art – and suicide and cluster bombs.

What is clear is that thinking is salubrious. Contemplation calms us. We feel better after. Prayer, chanting, reading, art have quieted human hearts for millennia. By thinking we find where we fit in the cosmos. We’re likely to be nicer to loved ones and refrain from kicking the cat. We “make sense” of things, as a cook makes cookies out of dough. Evil people scheme but don’t ponder. Evil’s never “a good idea.”

I think to stay sane. If I don’t spend time thinking, I get wobbly, anxious, lost. Depression pounces like a jackal in the night. What I’m thinking about matters less than the activity itself. I’ll feel fine after making this missive (provided it’s publishable) – go figure!

We humans, polls concur, feel bad. Everybody, it seems, is wrangling, rancorous, dyspeptic. Happy people are numbskulls – they just don’t get it! Trump’s grump-in-chief but his contumely is contagious. We’re all in a snit, even on holidays. Why, do you think?

If we thought more, we’d feel better. It feels good to “use your head.” Knowing what was what, we’d feel less threatened by the roar.

I’m allergic to souks, malls, crowds, as Jane will attest. Agoraphobia is the technical term for my distress. I start sweating, panicking, eying exits.

I’m allergic to the Web, too, though I’ve hung my shingle there. I hate how it stupefies, discombobulates, sucks me in. I’d prefer to feel hungry for Kierkegaard though he’s hard to chew. I view these missives as respites from our tidbit-taunted quotidian. “Come,” said the prophet Isaiah, “let us reason together.”