Modern (digital) life feels like drinking from a firehose. There’s so much content to triage. It was bad before the onslaught of generative AI. Now, the digital dam has burst. Our tendency to “give our two cents” about every issue—already increased by social media—has been further amplified by the AI-driven capacity for supercharged content creation.
Case in point: If I wanted to, I could’ve “written” this article in five minutes. I didn’t, but the fact that I could’ve “generated” a cogent piece—an insightful one, even—with a thoughtful “prompt” should not only give us pause, which it should, or alarm us, which it should, but also, and more fundamentally, raise the question:
Is more content and more communication always a good thing?
Our culture has long parroted the maxim that more information and more dialogue are de facto goods. Though such sentiment is rooted in a desire for empathy and understanding, our present situation should make us reconsider whether producing and consuming more data is necessarily a net gain for society. We presume that “knowing more” and “talking more” will drive progress and instill harmony. But does it?
Nicholas Carr says no. In his most recent book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, Carr argues that—in the digital world—more communication does not, in fact, lead to improved understanding or human flourishing.[1] He rejects the notion that if we just “keep talking,” a spirit of optimism and collaboration will finally overcome our ills. The cultural assumption is that if our words are true and well-articulated, and as many people as possible have access to them, everything will tend toward the good. Carr suggests, rather, that the increase in our communicative capacities—made possible by digital technologies—has not only failed to help us avoid social discord, but it has made social discord worse.
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I’m often lampooned by my friends, family, and colleagues for relating everything in some way to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. So be it. I think he has something to teach us here, too.
Tolkien was incredibly verbose. Even those who love his books often qualify their affections by saying things like, “Did he really need to spend five pages describing a forest glade?” or “Why are there so many songs interspersed throughout the story?” The Lord of the Rings’ three volumes run to nearly half a million words. If you include the vast collection of other texts that he authored which comprise the Middle-earth legendarium, that number is much higher.
Tolkien was, no doubt, the quintessential wordy professor. His massive textual corpus would seem to disqualify him, then, from critiquing modern man’s obsession with consuming and sharing information. Yet he does have something to say, and he says it, as he often does, through one of his characters.
Haldir is a relatively obscure character in The Lord of the Rings, a woodland elf who appears only in the first part of the story, The Fellowship of the Ring. A marchwarden of Lothlorien, the forest realm of the Lady Galadriel, Haldir encounters the Fellowship (the Ring-bearer Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, and others) as they flee the Mines of Moria on their quest to destroy the One Ring and save Middle-earth.[2]
Besides escorting the Fellowship to Galadriel’s court, Haldir doesn’t do much. But what little he says is quite profound. Two of the most perceptive quotes in the entire work come from Haldir:
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.[3]
Indeed, in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.[4]
What is especially interesting about Haldir is not simply the quality of his wisdom, but its economy. We sometimes assume that the very wise must expend much breath, or spill much ink, to expound their insights. But Tolkien puts some of the story’s most piercing words in the mouth of this woodland elf, who only speaks a few times and otherwise plays no significant part in the narrative. In Haldir, Tolkien shows us that wisdom is not a function of volume.
It’s not as if Tolkien doesn’t relay wisdom through other more prominent characters. Gandalf, after all, is a very wise wizard. Elrond has his moments too, as do Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, and many others. But Haldir’s brief appearance in the story, I think, and the profundity of his words, speak to Tolkien’s understanding of the relationship between wisdom and restraint.
I’m a wordy professor. Many reading this would likely admit the same. Maybe we should take a cue from Tolkien, from Haldir, and speak (and write) only when we have something worth saying. If we’re honest with ourselves, those occasions come around less often than we think—and what needs saying can usually be expressed in fewer words than we imagine. In the digital world, especially, such thrift is right and good.
And so, I’ll bring this to a close just shy of a thousand words. Whether they are wise is not mine to judge.
[1] Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025).
[2] Peter Jackson expanded Haldir’s character in his film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, inventing a subplot for the second movie, The Two Towers, in which Haldir and his elven kin come to the aid of Aragorn, King Théoden, and the people of Rohan, who are barricaded in the fortress of Helm’s Deep and under siege by Saruman’s army of Uruk-hai. Jackson has Haldir die in battle, giving him a heroic end that Tolkien himself never wrote.
[3] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 50th Anniversary ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 348–49.
[4] Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 348.
