Longing for nothingness

There was a story in a British newspaper over the weekend that touched on something I've come to believe of late: Modern technology is destroying our brains. More specifically, we're firing on too many synapses and are at risk of burning out our engines much earlier than intended. Part of the piece by Susan Greenfield reads...

Human identity, the idea that defines each and every one of us, could be facing an unprecedented crisis.

It is a crisis that would threaten long-held notions of who we are, what we do and how we behave. It goes right to the heart - or the head - of us all.

This crisis could reshape how we interact with each other, alter what makes us happy, and modify our capacity for reaching our full potential as individuals.

And it's caused by one simple fact: the human brain, that most sensitive of organs, is under threat from the modern world.

Unless we wake up to the damage that the gadget-filled, pharmaceutically-enhanced 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world.

It would be a world where such devices could enhance our muscle power, or our senses, beyond the norm, and where we all take a daily cocktail of drugs to control our moods and performance.

Walter Kirn's National Magazine Award nominated piece for The Atlantic touched on some of this as well.

The next inevitable contraction that everybody knows is coming, believes should have come a couple of years ago, and suspects can be postponed only if we pay no attention to the matter and stay very, very busy. I mean the end of the decade we may call the Roaring Zeros—these years of overleveraged, overextended, technology-driven, and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human energies in the dream of infinite connectivity. The overdoses, freak-outs, and collapses that converged in the late ’60s to wipe out the gains of the wide-eyed optimists who set out to “Be Here Now” but ended up making posters that read “Speed Kills” are finally coming for the wired utopians who strove to “Be Everywhere at Once” but lost a measure of innocence, or should have, when their manic credo convinced us we could fight two wars at the same time.

The Multitasking Crash.

The Attention-Deficit Recession.

So all of this was very fresh in my mind when I ran across this article by sportswriter Jason Whitlock that was linked on Deadspin.



Part of Whitlock's piece reads...

The problem with having too much is that it makes you fantasize about having nothing. I’m desperately trying to go cold turkey on everything: sports, cell phones, television, laptop, newspapers, Gates short ends, car and Rev. Wright.

It’s quite possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when I began reading the book Into the Wild, a well-reported chronicle of a 24-year-old kid who chucked everything — money, family and belongings — and walked into the Alaskan wilderness hoping to test and discover himself all at the same time. He died within a matter of months, and author Jon Krakauer retraced his last days on earth.

I miss having nothing. Now I have two cell phones that ring and text all the time. I have multiple e-mail addresses that never run empty. There are a thousand blogs, newspapers and Web sites that distract me hourly.

I've been thinking a bunch about this lately, largely because I can feel myself going through the same issues that were mentioned in these articles. I can barely concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes anymore. I can't watch a movie or a TV without reading something or playing on the computer at the same time. And visa versa. I'm also desperately trying to finish reading a book that I have loved reading. So much for the days of "can't put it down" reading. More like "can't not put it down no matter how good it is" these days. It's starting to piss me off to be honest.

I've also noticed that my social skills seem to be declining. No seriously, I'm finding myself more and more socially awkward in the types of moments that I used to flourish in. Detachment from humanity comes with a price and I'm beginning to feel I'm paying more for it that I'm actually comfortable paying. It's as if I bought a really expensive car and then decided that it wasn't all that and I keep driving past the car lot trying to muster up the courage to roll up and ask for my money back.

Like Whitlock, I'm feel as though I'm about to start my own large scale personal rebellion against all of this. I already do it on a small scale by avoiding the Internet on the weekends occasionally and by ignoring my phone completely for hours, sometimes days at a time, but i'm seriously thinking of going all out with this. I'm not sure how I'm going to go about doing it, but all of this connectivity and the massive quantities of consumable information that comes along with it don't seem to be enhancing my life in the way that I thought it would. On the contrary, I'm starting to feel a detrimental effect.

Sometimes, at the end of the day, I feel so exhausted, so drained, but when I take a long, hard look at what I accomplished during that day, I feel sort of empty. Is this because I actually accomplished so little because of all the distractions, or am I setting the bar of expectations for myself so impossibly high that I'll never be satisfied?

Maybe I'm just living inside of my own head a little too much.