Imagine walking on a beach. Every step leaves a footprint, but the waves eventually wash them away. You keep moving forward, leaving traces behind, but never carrying the entire path with you. That’s how intelligence effectively works. It’s done not by holding onto everything, but by keeping what’s useful and letting go of the rest. This got me thinking about the way we process information. The more we forget about specific details, the more uncertain we become about the past. But maybe that’s not a flaw but maybe it’s a necessity. Intelligence isn’t about just storing knowledge; it’s about refining it as well. Like a planet moving through space, bending the fabric of reality as it goes, our minds carve pathways, shed unnecessary weight, and adapt.
Now imagine intelligence as a moving body; never still, always refining, always shedding! It is similar to a planet bending space-time as it drifts, like a snake peeling off its old skin, intelligence isn’t just about gathering information. It’s about letting some of it go away. We tend to think of intelligence as accumulation—the more we know, the better we think. But real intelligence works differently. It moves forward by forgetting, by distilling, by deleting what no longer serves a purpose. This isn’t just true for human thought—it’s a universal pattern, echoed in the very structure of reality.
The Mental Cost of Hoarding Information
The universe is constantly expanding while its content moves, sheds, and distills. Intelligence is also following the the same pattern. There is no absolute record, only traces or footprints in sand, ripples in space-time, neural echoes that shift and fade from time to time. The act of gaining knowledge is inseparable from the act of forgetting, because to learn is to leave something behind.
In fact when you look around, you find plenty of instances that could be explained in this way. They all follow this rhythm: DNA that’s encoding life, celestial bodies warping the fabric of reality, memory pruning itself to make space for pattern recognition. Art, too, follows this rule. It is not just an expression, but a process of encoding, distilling the ineffable into form, sound, color, motion. It preserves and it erodes. It is a shedding of raw experience into something refined, something transmittable.
Imagine walking into a library where every book ever written is piled in a giant, unorganized heap. No sections, no curation, just a massive accumulation of words. Would you learn anything from this? Probably not. You’d spend all your time digging, trying to separate the valuable from the useless ones. And trust me that’s not an easy task!
That’s what social media and the internet have done to our minds. We’re bombarded with more information than we could ever process, but most of it are noise and misleading headlines, half-baked opinions around debunked ideas, outraged click baits, and irrelevant facts disguised as knowledge. The more we hold onto it, the harder it becomes to think clearly and able to make good judgments.
Our mind, like the universe, isn’t a storage unit; it’s a navigation system. Holding onto too much; whether it’s irrelevant memories, outdated beliefs, or digital clutter, only slows down our ability to move through the unknown. In that sense, forgetting isn’t failure. It’s an act of survival by making a subtle substitution and adjustments.
See More Clearly
A few months ago I was listening to a Lex Fridman podcast about X Neuralink and he was asking Elon Musk about the metrics him and his team have been designing for their new products and how would they measure their success? It was fascinating to hear how crucial fast communication is for a smooth integration. Increasing the communication speed involves changing multiple factors, you could increase the bandwidth, decrease latency or apply both of these changes. You might be able to create a better encoding system to transfer data more efficiently and so data compression is another approach towards optimising the communication pattern. However, regardless of the different approaches we’d take to solve the speed issue, it is no secret the length and organisation of information plays a pivotal role in the end to end outcome.
Some of the sharpest thinker scientists, writers, philosophers don’t just accumulate knowledge. They refine it. They delete what’s unnecessary so they can see patterns more clearly. A great writer doesn’t write by adding more words; they cut away what doesn’t serve the story. A great scientist doesn’t just collect data—they eliminate bad hypotheses to focus on real discoveries. The same applies to intelligence at every level, from the way our brains work to the way civilizations evolve.
How to Delete More and Think Better
- Question everything you consume. If an article, video, or social post makes you feel outraged or urgent, pause. Is it adding value, or is it manipulating your attention?
- Unfollow, mute, and declutter. A clean digital space means a clean mind. If you wouldn’t let someone shout nonsense in your house, why let them live in your head?
- Forget what doesn’t serve you. Just because you learned something once doesn’t mean it’s still useful. Let go of outdated opinions, bad advice, and irrelevant knowledge.
- Embrace uncertainty. Deleting bad information doesn’t mean you’ll have perfect answers. It just means you’re clearing space for better thinking.
The Intelligence of Letting Go
We see patterns everywhere, but do they belong to the universe, or to the lens through which we perceive it? The recurrence of structure—gravity shaping orbits, DNA shaping life, intelligence shaping itself—feels like a grand design, but perhaps it is only our own architecture staring back at us. A cosmic mirage. A reflection of the way we are built to make sense of things.
Maybe everything is an art form. Maybe intelligence itself is not about accumulating knowledge, but about sculpting it and stripping away the excess, leaving behind only what is necessary to move forward. A celestial body rotates, an artist paints, a mind remembers, a mind forgets. Each motion is a step in an ongoing distillation, a constant negotiation between permanence and impermanence.
In the end, what remains? The footprints, or the path taken?