As I often say, life happens to me faster than I record it.
I don’t really have the instantaneous social media presence like most people. I
don’t do things and immediately share it with the world. It’s a different kind
of documentation of one’s existence but one that doesn’t seem to suit me very
well. Ben Hecht said something about this long before social media existed:
“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by
reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand
of a clock.” -Ben Hecht,
screenwriter, playwright, novelist, director, and producer (1894-1964)
Obviously I’m connecting the old
daily newspaper with social media today. Interestingly, the pace of the current
media is lightyears faster and thus accentuates Hecht’s point. I know people
are trying to make sense of all this by extracting data over time and thereby
determining patterns and meaning. It’s depicted in all kinds of graphics and
gets interpreted in various ways. To be honest, I don’t think we have a handle
where the world is going and it sometimes feels like the car has lost its
breaks. I think the same can be said of certain peoples’ lives.
I tend to try to reel in some of
this, at least in so far as it is something I can control, whether it is in my
job, my family or in my own head. I gravitate towards budgeting time for
reflection. Periodically taking stock. Not getting to caught up in the moment.
Giving time for wisdom to get involved in steering the car. People seem to
increasingly steer their lives like a child sitting in a car pretending to
drive. The jerky motions left and right would never make for a successful driving
experience. It would produce the same nausea I get from tracking news.
Information is coming out so fast, the quality of journalism suffers and
there’s a tendency to overdramatize any one thing.
I’ve spoken to some people that
have decided to look at their favorite news websites no more than once a week
or more to mitigate this phenomenon. I’ve done that myself on occasion (though
I’m often too curious to wait that long) and it does sometimes feel like you’ve
missed an eternity. But when you step back you realize that in reality you
didn’t really miss all that much.
In any case, don’t expect me to
spew facts about my life moment by moment. I probably have a much more
interesting life than a lot people who do but it’s a level of narcissism I
prefer to avoid. And it wouldn’t provide a better picture of how, or even what,
I’m doing. In most cases it would just be stuff – noise that someone else is
trying to filter through in their respective feeds. I'd rather not.
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