What will effect my life next?

I want to just go along sometimes from day to day ignoring everything. I learn about a lot of things, but I cannot act on them. For instance, I know all about the politics of the middle east but I have no reason to ever go there. I have not been the victim of a terrorist attack nor do I know anyone who has. My life continues as normal. I could have been a complete airhead and never picked up a newspaper or paid attention to any non technical/job-related news for the last 5 years and nothing in my life would have been significantly changed except for longer waits at the airport. Learning about things does one thing, however, it teaches me to be afraid of things.

To combat this, I sometimes try to focus on information that will benefit me directly. To some degree in my professional career I can do this. In the rest of my life though information does not have the same amount of value for the effort spent aquiring it. It's more for entertainment purposes only. Maybe using all this information I have aquired may have some lasting impact or perhaps I am just an echo chamber reverberating memes generated by others as opposed to speaking from personal experience.