The Firehose

Drinking from a fire hose is like eating the richest chocolate cake or reading the most dense paragraph. Five seconds will quench your thirst, one bite will quench your taste buds, one sentence will be enough to think about for hours.

Drinking from a fire hose is often used as an analogy for information overload. Try watching 30 TED talks in one day, and you’ll begin to experience this idea. Do that 5 days in a row and you’ll understand why there is a thing called the TED crash - it’s what happens to people after attending the week-long TED conference, and it’s very real.

If you’re like me you might enjoy drinking from the fire hose. While drinking, there’s a tipping point when we begin to not worry about quenching our thirst any more and start thinking about swimming. Our disposition changes as we allow the water/information to just flow over us. We finally realize that it’s everywhere, all around us, and we can access it whenever it's needed. No need to worry that we’ll miss something. No need to worry that our thirst won’t be quenched. The fire hose continues, the water abounds, and we can abide.