Technology And Being Driven To Distraction

A sad fact is that an all too uncommon occurrence is people taking out their cell phones while at dinner to send a text message or answer a call while mid-conversation with a friend. This now popular antisocial maneuver is indicative of our culture’s growing, bittersweet and ironic addiction to “social media” outlets. Add to text messaging and the self-inflicted live-time updates of Twitter, the Facebooks and the variety of other interactive websites, and you’ve got and environment screaming out for the rebirth of that tragic Greek hero — Narcissus.

But it isn’t just narcissism that can push generations of people into becoming living zombies. The drive to achieve, to climb the ladder, to gain more, or even the fear that you are just missing out on something are just a handful of the factors that drive people into living lives that might not be as fulfilling as they could be. The recent study on a group of students that tried to “unplug” for a day (of which I wrote about recently) highlights this well.

The ancient Indian philosopher Chanakya was once questioned by one of his disciples about the legitimacy of the claim that one can live in the world yet not live in the world simultaneously. In his shrewd, sagelike manner, Chanakya responded by giving the student a pitcher of water filled to the brim and instructs him to traverse the entire town’s festival that day without spilling a drop; thus avoiding penalty of death. At the end of the day, after the student has successfully accomplished the task, Chanakya asks him to describe the day’s festivities. Clearly, he knows nothing of them, having focused solely on the given task. Lesson learned.

Cultural historian Christopher Lasch’s 1979 bestselling book, The Culture of Narcissism, brought to light the empty self-indulgence created by an information age. He believed that an overabundance of information actually resulted in a weaker sense of self and thus an incapacity to form meaningful relationships. You have to truly love yourself before you can love another. Worse yet, the bytes of information zipping around today make it seem like Lasch’s book described something out of Leave It To Beaver.

Facebook came around at just the right time, as psychologists noted a 30% increase in Americans’ personality test scores for narcissism from 1982 to 2006. They couldn’t have anticipated announcements like “… is getting married”, as she’s texting right before walking down the aisle; or things like “… can’t find my keys and is late for work.” It’s like people are creating maps of their lives instead of really living, similar to a family that must record their vacation so that later they might see what they did while they were texting their friends about how much fun they were having. You’re there now, you’re with them now, you can actually live now.

The ever-elusive “Now-moment.” It’s said that time flies when you’re having fun. This “fun” often results from “living in the now.” Much of our internal angst derives from our constantly juggling what we coulda, woulda, shoulda done, with what we could, would, should do; all while we can’t actually escape the immediacy of life itself. Fear results from anticipating something that might happen in the future, and anxiety as a result of what did happen in the past.

A major component of the arrow of time lies in our own view of it: when we’re younger, time seems to go more slowly — progressing from age 1 to 2 effectively doubles your mileage around the sun. When we’re older it seems time passes more quickly. When consciously aware of time it can barely seem to pass at all. When unaware — such as when sleeping, or caught up in what Abraham Maslow calls a “peak experience” (losing yourself in music, in an athletic event, with someone you love, profound religious experiences, etc) — time ceases to be a factor. Further still, Einstein shows us with his Theory of Relativity that time isn’t even absolute. Instead it is relative to your position. My favorite philosopher, Alan Watts, filmed an hour-long program for PBS discussing the nature of time shortly before his death in 1973.

Many cultures and worldviews avoid much of our angst about time. The Buddhist Wheel of Time treats time as something that circles back upon itself, creating cycles of life and death, making it a rather arbitrary exercise to pinpoint a “beginning” and an “end”.

Linguist Benjamin Whorf presses us to imagine how differently we would view our lives without our notions of past and future, with no interest in “exact sequences, dating, calendars, chronology,” but instead with just the present. “Language shapes the way we think,” he wrote, “and determines what we can think about.” (More specifically, he made the claim that the Aztecan Hopi tribe actually lived this way, which turned out not to be the case after communications were improved. However, with Dan Everett’s recent work with the Amazonian Piraha, speculations about a life with little notion of time and studying the relationship between language and thought has been renewed.)

In the Bible, a thousand years to G-d is said to be like a day. Typically this is stated in some pseudo-scientific way as religious communities try to square their religious views with the scientific evidence for evolution. However, it could be said that for the ardent spiritual observer, a thousand years in the presence of G-d could also seem like a day, as they lose themselves in what is surely an overwhelming experience.

Recently in my home state of Kentucky (famous for college basketball, horses, hospitality, and its beautiful women) a law was passed that makes it illegal to text on your phone while you drive. The law was passed with good reason — texting while driving is roughly twice as likely to result in a car crash than driving while under the influence (D.U.I.). Despite the aforementioned hospitality, I sometimes see bumper stickers that read “Hang Up and Drive”. Perhaps it’s time for us to hang up and live, so that we might start to get a little more control over time in our own lives and avoid losing so much of ourselves to unnecessary distractions. After all, who’s got time for that?

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