"something given has no value". The author is going out of his way to make his acquisition of information harder so that he might value it more than the same information that just lands in his lap. Some distinguish data from information from knowledge from wisdom. Slowing down and forcing oneself to absorb better - to think and reflect on human scales - is noble, but perhaps the problem is we need differently shaped brains to deal with this firehose of information. Attention span suffers at this level, no time to synthesize what we just absorbed.