Rattling Around my Brain Box Part 2

 Well I'm starting this with the intention of this being only a two part rant, but, hey, who knows.

Last time I was discussing attention, and how our attention spans are ridiculously low now.  I mentioned in passing that the same podcast was also about respect.  The premise of the podcast was essentially that we don't pay enough attention to people, so we cannot possibly respect them.  Think about it: how much can you really get to know someone if every three minutes you're interrupted, or you're interrupting yourself?  If every time you start a conversation one of you inevitably pulls out a phone?

If you never actually get to know someone, can you understand what it takes to respect them?  And how can we possibly show respect for other human beings on the internet when out attention spans are so low that the other people we interact with are little more than human avatars with stereotypical personalities.  How many times in the past week have I jumped to a conclusion that someone on the internet was a jerk, or stupid, or completely out of their mind?  More than I'd like to admit.  If the people we deal with on the internet aren't real people in our minds, then we won't treat them with respect. The time it takes to understand another person's point of view is time we just aren't willing/able to spend these days.

I mentioned in the last post that I had just finished a book.  It was a book called A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller, Jr.  I had purchased the book years before in a 25 cent bin at a used book store in California.  It is one of a half dozen or so mid-century sci-fi books I picked up from that bin that I never really thought much of.  I started reading it earlier this year with the expectation that it would be a fun, light book that I could finish quickly as I greatly needed a quick read to get back on track with reading.  It was actually a fairly complex book, but it was very good and I did end up finishing it in about two weeks.

I won't run through the entire book, but I enjoyed it.  The book is a post apocalyptic sci-fi centered around a Catholic monastery that becomes the one place in the world that is preserving knowledge when the rest of the world is destroying it.  The book takes place over multiple centuries, and ends on a somewhat surprising but also seemingly inevitable note.

Near the end of the book, one of the monks has a quote that I want to reproduce here because it really knocked the themes of my brain box ramblings into a more cohesive thought pattern:

"The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well.  They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty..."

Life right now for most of the people in the world is better than it's ever been in terms of material standard of living.  Yet, people everywhere, myself included, feel utterly disconnected and often hopeless.  We are seemingly purposeless, all while being busier than we've ever been.  Why?  And what does this do to our society?

I think the why is becoming more and more obvious the more time we all spend on the internet.  The internet, our devices, social media, and just technology in general, are stealing our attention.  Without that attention, we're adrift.  We cannot respect one another as equal human beings.  We cannot foster the deep, meaningful relationships that give lives meaning.  We have a multitude of acquaintances, but few to no true friends.

Then we get online and pour out our pain, our frustrations, our anger, the only way we know how.  We scream into the void, and get back nothing but white noise, or worse, anger, fear, hate.  People don't want to know us online.  They want to interact with our avatars long enough to agree with us and give us a thumbs up, or disagree with us and leave an angry diatribe about why we're wrong, or stupid.

Maybe the way to control my own sphere of influence is to remove myself from things like social media.  Reduce my internet presence.  Try to be more present in meat space.

That's what I've been doing, and why I'm not apologetic about this second part taking so long to finish.  I hope you'll consider it, too.

Rattling around in my Brain Box Part 1

 I get the feeling this is going to take me a long time to write.  This topic has been bouncing around in my brain box since before my last post, and that was six or seven months ago.  It came to head in the last two weeks and I can't ignore my desire to put words on the digital page anymore.

Two weeks ago I was listening to a string of different podcasts that all seemed interconnected.  I should have taken better notes, but one was from the Chris Spangle Show and at least one I'm pretty sure was a Jordan Harbinger Show.  There were more.  I can't remember them all and I didn't note them.

Last time I talked about spheres of influence and how I've been trying to only work within my own sphere and stop giving excess time and attention to what's outside that sphere.  That topic came up again on Chris's show as he talked about how he's stepping back from politics and working on himself.  He's recognized that change is personal and that he has no expectation of changing national politics anytime soon.  I mentioned in my last post that this kind of thing was reaching a saturation point.  It's heartwarming, but coupled with the other shows I listened to it led me down some other paths.

There was a show about reality.  I'm pretty sure it was Jordan Harbinger.  Anyhow, the point is that reality is a lot more subjective than most of us understand.  To the point that in a lot of instances, one's expectation of reality is reality.  You can literally think specific realities into existence.  So this got me down a rabbit hole, and maybe the whole sphere of influence saturation point thing is just that I'm focusing on it, so I'm seeing it more, and all the platforms I interact with serve me up what I want to see based on the algorithms they run on so if I keep clicking those things I get more and more of them.

I'll be honest by the end I was less warm of heart.

Then there was another show about attention and respect, which I listened to because I'm always trying to improve as a father, husband, and manager.  Man, this show was not really about any of that.  This was another Harbinger I think, and the point of the show is that we've completely screwed our attention spans.  The average person has an attention span of like 3 minutes now.  We have been so trained by our jobs and devices to expect interruption that if we don't get interrupted, we'll interrupt ourselves.  Like, it's been three minutes and even though my phone didn't go off I feel the urge to stop what I'm doing and check my email or pop over to some social media site and see if I have any notifications.

This hit me deep.  I've done a lot to try to mitigate this.  I've removed all social apps from my phone.  I set up a difficult two factor authentication that makes it a pain to log into those social apps on the web and thus discourages me from doing so.  I turned off notifications from basically everything except text messages.  Even my work phone is locked down so the only notifications I get are instant messages and texts.  Yet I still find myself pulling out one of those phones when my computer is taking longer than 5 seconds to load something, or when I'm standing in line at the grocery store for more than 30 seconds, or for no reason because I just remembered it was in my pocket.

I have trouble reading.  Last year I finished two books.  I can't even watch a TV show without pulling out my phone.  I've had to set boundaries at home where I set my phone in my bedroom and close the door when I'm spending time with my kids because I found myself pulling out my phone when I was supposed to be paying attention to my kids.  It's nuts and I hate myself a little because of it.

I'm not going to be able to say everything I wanted on this post; it's getting pretty long.  I'll try to come back soon as I still have more to get out.  I'll finish with this: I've been taking "phone free days" on the weekends when I have the luxury, and boy howdy has that been nice.  The last few Saturdays I didn't go anywhere and I was able to lock my phones in my room and just enjoy my time without them.  I finished a book (which I so badly want to talk about but I think that's going to be a whole post unto itself), and I play so much better with the boys when the phone is locked away.  It's insane to think about the fact that I have to be so deliberate about locking down the phones, but I guess it's come to this.  Even now, I've only been able to spend this time writing because the phones are upstairs somewhere.

Well, I hope this was an enjoyable insight into my brain box.  Like I said, with luck more to come in the not too distant future.