I've noticed a few ways in which this overload of information manifests.
You've got the people who consume a lot of "information" yet can't make much sense of it, or at least in a way that lines up to shared reality. I'd say this represents the average person. The main coping mechanism for these people is to consume information as entertainment and otherwise not think about what they're taking in. Otherwise, they might subscribe to prefab reality "lenses" that effectively give them the orders they need to make executive decisions in life.
Then you have those who actually can remember lots of trivial knowledge, but can hardly think beyond the level of factoids. In other words, they think that the world can be explained by what's directly in front of them, ignoring the need to distill, synthesize, and extrapolate in order to make predictive models of the world. I know a few intellectuals that insist on this thought process, and their predictions are usually wrong, yet they don't adjust their belief that memorizing a bunch of facts makes them more accurate thinkers. Likewise to the common person, the trivial knowledge archetype sometimes subscribes to existing world views so they can cherry pick knowledge that fits those views, mistakenly believing that their views are original and not assigned to them.
There's also the opposite of the last archetype, which is the overly abstract thinker who can't remember many specific facts at all, so they cope by passively consuming large amounts of "data" and distilling it down into a models of the world that make sense to them. This is the camp that I fall into. It's not that I don't remember anything specific, but individual factoids must be of significant interest for me to commit them to concrete memory. Even if my models of reality don't line up on a factual basis, the more important thing to me is whether I get results. The problem with people like I am is that we can think in terms of big picture but sometimes fail when thinking in a micro-scale actually counts for something. This becomes even worse when there is too much information to consume, because any bit of compelling data causes the distilled reality models to expand in ways that might not be justified.
It's up to you. :) If you're getting what you want out of life, or if your predictions are usually accurate, in spite of having a mental model that isn't technically correct, then that would mean having results that didn't come from excessive rumination or memorizing lots of units of specific information. Similarly, religion can lead a person to perform actions in a way that are of benefit even if the beliefs instilled upon them are factual nonsense. What I'm saying is that a person can do just that but with high level conceptual structures as opposed to either religion or pedantic data hoarding.
When you keep trying to do right, but your world is perpetually on fire, you probably aren't getting good results.
Interestingly, this can be seen as an extension of the same principle; in a given person's life, there are impossibly many events going on all the time, each of which is providing some benefit, or negative result, and you could if you choose, try to look for specific memories of achievements or failures in order to benchmark your life's progress, falling back onto them and recalling these specific moments.
The obvious problem with such events is that they may not be representative, and so like a gambler remembering the last few wins, you could keep trying to solve a problem.
Conversely, you could try to remember conclusions, and a few simple procedures, while also passively using a diary or data entry system, such that you have a general feel of "how things have been going lately", without any specific examples, and then occasionally rerun your procedure, taking stock of recent events from recorded data, and update your abstract value.
Then there's the hybrid approach; working on a dataset, find a few specific data points that most properly represent the diversity of your current experience, then remember those, the general feeling associated with them, and your procedure for updating them.
That way you use your emotional episodic memory, but tie it to things that are verified by more careful reflective analysis.
You've got the people who consume a lot of "information" yet can't make much sense of it, or at least in a way that lines up to shared reality. I'd say this represents the average person. The main coping mechanism for these people is to consume information as entertainment and otherwise not think about what they're taking in. Otherwise, they might subscribe to prefab reality "lenses" that effectively give them the orders they need to make executive decisions in life.
Then you have those who actually can remember lots of trivial knowledge, but can hardly think beyond the level of factoids. In other words, they think that the world can be explained by what's directly in front of them, ignoring the need to distill, synthesize, and extrapolate in order to make predictive models of the world. I know a few intellectuals that insist on this thought process, and their predictions are usually wrong, yet they don't adjust their belief that memorizing a bunch of facts makes them more accurate thinkers. Likewise to the common person, the trivial knowledge archetype sometimes subscribes to existing world views so they can cherry pick knowledge that fits those views, mistakenly believing that their views are original and not assigned to them.
There's also the opposite of the last archetype, which is the overly abstract thinker who can't remember many specific facts at all, so they cope by passively consuming large amounts of "data" and distilling it down into a models of the world that make sense to them. This is the camp that I fall into. It's not that I don't remember anything specific, but individual factoids must be of significant interest for me to commit them to concrete memory. Even if my models of reality don't line up on a factual basis, the more important thing to me is whether I get results. The problem with people like I am is that we can think in terms of big picture but sometimes fail when thinking in a micro-scale actually counts for something. This becomes even worse when there is too much information to consume, because any bit of compelling data causes the distilled reality models to expand in ways that might not be justified.