Passing our time in the grassland away

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker yesterday who's an avid outdoorsman. He recently spent three weeks in the woods with his coon dog, Murphy, just the two of them, with no other human contact. He craves these getaways because they offer an escape from over-stimulated, attention diverting technocratic barrage.

"When I'm working I don't talk to my family. When I'm in the woods, I talk to them more than I ever would, because there is the time for it, and there is a priority placed upon it."

It made me think how I rarely talk to my family, even though they're only ten minutes away from my apartment. The one time a week I do see them, I'm in and out, and even then the experience is disrupted by phone calls. I said I'd never get a Blackberry, but my job has forced me to, and now it completely dominates me.

My co-worker told me about an article he had read about how destructive technology is to our ability to complete projects and goals--the pop-ups, videos, phone calls, texts, and e-mails that have become an inescapable presence in our everyday lives. They completely disrupt a natural biological process: an innately focused, zeroed-in drive to complete long-term goals, such as building shelter, hunting for food, planting crops, and maintaining strong familial ties. And so we sit at our desks W.I.R.E.D. into our gadgets, harmlessly passing our time in the grassland away.

It doesn't make us better at "multitasking"; rather we have become the kings of procrastination, because there's always something else--an article to read, an e-mail to check, a quick message to send--that exists solely to divert us from what we're trying to accomplish. It's all there at our fingertips--in the palm of our hand if we own an iphone--and yet it simultaneously imprisons us.