Curiously, all the material out there today can cause a sort of paralysis. Similar to how we used to argue and banter and have fun about factual disagreements

Curiously, all the material out there today can cause a sort of paralysis. Similar to how we used to argue and banter and have fun about factual disagreements at the bar, while today we can take our phones and look it up (upsides are obvious of course) sucking out part of the fun. Now if you have some faily simple question today and Google it, you'll find tons of adjacent advice, articles, perhaps even a community dedicated to that sort of thing, libraries etc. Now you either deliberately shut it all out and go ahead with your project, explicitly ignoring all the above, or you start learning it, standing on the shoulders of giants etc. It can be kind of discouraging to see how much you don't know but is out there, while in the 80s and 90s people had no choice but to rediscover lots of stuff on their own and feel as if they had actually invented the thing, simply due to a lack of Google and Wikipedia. But overall it's no reason to give up, there is always stuff at the edges to look into, we just have to climb the tree a bit more because the low hanging fruit is gone. Or just pretend we live pre-Google and program away, without checking the answer first. Your boss may not like this latter strategy though.