Success Quote by John Naisbitt

Naisbitt’s line lands because it flatters and indicts at the same time: you, modern person, have everything at your fingertips and still feel vaguely behind. Coming from a businessman and trend-watcher, it’s less a philosopher’s lament than a market diagnosis. Information is the raw material; knowledge is the value-added product. The joke, and the warning, is that we’ve optimized the supply chain for the wrong commodity.

The intent is to separate volume from meaning. “Drowning” implies not just excess but loss of agency: data isn’t empowering if it arrives faster than we can interpret it. “Starved” makes the deficit bodily and urgent, suggesting that a constant feed can coexist with a real hunger for clarity, judgment, and direction. In other words, the system can be working perfectly and still produce a kind of cultural malnutrition.

The subtext is a critique of incentives. Information is cheap to produce, easy to monetize, and endlessly refreshable; knowledge requires time, expertise, and responsibility. It can’t be pushed at scale without friction. That mismatch explains why news cycles, dashboards, and notifications proliferate while understanding doesn’t. It also lets Naisbitt gently shift blame from individuals (“read more”) to structures (“you are being flooded”).

Context matters: Naisbitt wrote in an era when “information society” was emerging as both promise and business opportunity. The line anticipates the internet age’s central paradox: more access doesn’t automatically yield more wisdom, and the bottleneck moves from scarcity to discernment.