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January 7 - January 13, 2019
Jerry Seinfeld once did a skit in which he imagined aliens looking down from space, seeing us scooping up our dogs’ poop, and assuming that it was our pets who were the real masters. Ten years on, what would extraterrestrials deduce if they observed us running around following the commands of little devices on our wrists and checking these tiny screens obsessively every few minutes? They’d likely conclude that some all-powerful overlord was telling us what to do at all times through these strange gadgets. This isn’t the stuff of science fiction or a stand-up comedy routine but a daily reality
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In spending our so-called leisure time indoors mindlessly pounding away on stationary objects, we’re severing our connection to the natural world. As my good friend and surfer Laird Hamilton told me, “Technology’s tendency to insulate us from nature while we’re participating in it ultimately leads to us failing to absorb all it has to offer. We’re missing out because we’re looking down at our phones the whole time, and that’s having an effect on our brain.”
“Technology is an excellent tool and a terrible master.”
One survey found that the typical American touches his or her phone 2,617 times a day, and that’s not taking into account the additional interactions people have with their fitness-related devices.
We’re living in a constant state of high anxiety. From the fear-driven television news we watch to the alarmism of political bloggers to the fear of missing out that perpetuates our need to update others on our every action and simultaneously look at theirs, so much of our environment is making us twitchy. The trouble is that our body doesn’t know the difference between real and perceived threats when it comes to stress and the negative, multisystemic effects it has on inflammation, the pituitary-adrenal axis, and so much more. As Dave Asprey writes in Head Strong, many of us are in “a
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The trouble is that we’re lying to ourselves if we think that there are no downsides to this approach. My friend (and Frank Merritt’s VitalityPro colleague) Brandon Rager reminded me recently that when we’re always available, we feel obliged to answer every call, reply to every text, and like every social-media post that comes our way. In doing so, we take time away from our friends and families and reinforce an exaggerated sense of obligation. Because we can access our work e-mail in-boxes and documents from anywhere and on any device, we also feel guilty if we’re not being productive around
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It’s not a stretch to say that our lives have never been more fragmented or distracted. Uninterrupted access to millions of websites, the ability to send messages around the world in the blink of an eye, and carrying around a productivity tool / music player / camera / communication device plus a wearable with us wherever we go means that we’re never bored. And this is precisely the problem.
Because we have so much going on at all times, we can never fully immerse ourselves in anything. In the age of perpetual stimulation and distraction, we’ve become so scatterbrained that technology thought leader Linda Stone coined the phrase continuous partial attention (CPA). Stone explains it as “an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always on high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. . . . In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling
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British philosopher Alan Watts advised, “Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.” Amen to that.
