Amusing Ourselves to Death

With every day I'm unemployed and sitting on the internet forgetting about the material world, I feel my attention span dwindling. My mind feels like a net; I cast it out and pull in all these wriggling thoughts, then I have to deal with them each all at once. I open a zillion new tabs in twenty new windows; I feel hurried like there's only a limited time all of this will stay accessible and I've got to cram it all in to my mind now now now.

My brain feels hungry and open to new tidbits, but by the time I get through it and the windows are all closed; every link clicked, every tab finished: I've got brain-bloat. I can't remember 40% of anything I've just taken in; I can't read an article that's a page long (let alone five, eight, or eighteen) because I'm used to reading a paragraph (a visual sound-byte) and moving on to the next idea. Watching a two minute video is a struggle, because my mind gets bored after the first twenty seconds.

I read this fantastic book at the beginning of the year called Amusing Ourselves to Death, it was by Niel Postman. One premise of the book can be summed up here, but aside from the conspiracy theories it was really a book tracking the development of human communication, and the consequent slow demise of our collective attention span. It's primarily a critique of television (which I enthusiastically condone), but statements made about our inability to focus can be applied to life today in all the same ways.

Anyway, I need to meditate more, that's all.