Blinding yourself to the truth isn’t always a bad thing.

We hear it all the time: stay informed, watch the news, pay attention to everything going on. But is that really serving us?

The truth is the world is already too much. Too much color, too much stimulation, more information than we could ever process. Jenny Odell talks about this in How to Do Nothing — how social media and news streams constantly displace us from our sense of place, our geography, even our time. We scroll from a 1920s photo to a present-day tragedy to a Siberian fox video, and our minds feel fragmented, out of sync.

The brain itself knows it can’t handle it all. It compresses. It filters. It decides what to remember and what to forget. That’s why when you take a walk, you don’t notice every tree, bug, and leaf. They’re there, but only in the periphery.

I call this the mind’s aperture.

Like a camera lens, it can zoom in or zoom out, adjust its focus, and decide what gets clarity. Some of this is automatic — loud sounds, sudden emotions, anything that spikes attention. But a lot of it needs to be chosen, trained, or even designed into our environments.

I think about it in four ways:

• Automatic — the stuff that pulls attention without asking.
• Deliberate — the choice to focus on one thing and ignore another.
• Training — building the muscle to not get yanked by every distraction.
• Systemic — shaping environments so your aperture naturally narrows where you want it.

What helps me picture this best is a racehorse on the track.

A racehorse doesn’t wear blinders because the rider doesn’t trust it. Blinders are there because horses are prey animals. They spook. The smallest sign of danger sends them veering. And when that happens, they won’t just bolt — they’ll often throw the rider right off. Not because they want to. In fact, horses build incredibly deep emotional bonds with their riders — bonds of trust that take years to form. But instincts override even that connection.

When a horse spooks, the rider is on the ground. Maybe with a broken back. At best, you’re dusting yourself off and waiting until the horse calms before you can climb back on.

Our minds are like that too. One wrong distraction can throw us, and there’s no hopping back in immediately. You need recovery, recalibration.

So we use blinders of our own.

An information diet. Pomodoro timers. Choosing who we spend time with. Structuring our workspaces. Even the debate over open-office layouts fits here — great for sales teams who thrive on chatter, terrible for engineers who need long stretches of focused work. These are systemic ways of narrowing the aperture.

Blinding yourself isn’t the same as hiding.

This isn’t about being an ostrich, shoving your head into the sand. It’s about letting go of the idea that more information is always better. Often, it’s worse.

Blindly accepting the rule that “you must stay informed” can scatter your mind more than ignoring things that don’t serve you, that won’t hurt you if you don’t know them, and that you can’t control anyway.

The principle of the mind’s aperture is really a principle of prioritization — knowing thyself in the moment, knowing your goals, and choosing what deserves focus.

Because the world will keep throwing distractions. The aperture will keep narrowing.

The question is: are you adjusting it, or letting it spin on its own?