By the end of the day, I just want to watch something stupid. Something mindless. My brain is completely spent.
The Internet Age offers up everything that's going on in this world with no end in sight. But because we’re able to plug it in and digest, we think we can handle the enormity of it all. Newsflash: We can't.
The issue was never the information itself. The world has always been too large for one person to fathom. The issue is we try. We squeeze stories where they don’t belong, in between the seconds of our already complex lives. You could be enjoying a nice meal and still guzzle down some violence on the other side of the globe. You could wake up and wonder what your friends are doing on social media, only to hear about some natural disaster tearing up communities not too far and not too different than your own.
You’ve been on the internet, you know this. I’m not saying anything new here.
The idea of a limit should be enough to remind us that we can’t save the world. We can only shift one slice at a time. To care about everything means you care about nothing because to genuinely care requires time and attention. And we know there is only so much of that stuff.
I get the irony of sharing my own thoughts, but I started wondering about all this after reading an Atlantic article titled Hygiene Theater is a Huge Waste of Time. Author Derek Thompson wrote, "COVID-19 has reawakened America’s spirit of misdirected anxiety, inspiring businesses and families to obsess over risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed. This is hygiene theater."
We yearn to do something, anything in the face of this confusing void of existential dread. And we've decided on disinfecting shopping carts. Now get out there!
Echoing the thoughts of a Rutgers microbiology professor, Thompson continued , "...an obsession with contaminated surfaces distracts from more effective ways to combat COVID-19. ‘People have prevention fatigue,’ Goldman told me. ‘They’re exhausted by all the information we’re throwing at them. We have to communicate priorities clearly; otherwise, they’ll be overloaded.’"
It's too hard for us to admit - it might be better to know less. We feel like we're being bad people by not subjecting ourselves to awful things. It's not to say you should shield yourself from every injustice, but you need energy to fight some fights, not all of them. And opening your heart to the entire world’s woes will never end well.
I'm not suggesting we all throw our phones in a lake, or go full nihilist and watch the world burn. We can just turn the faucet down a bit. Because maybe we would be better to one another if we weren't so zapped of our energy all the time.
I'll end here with a small personal victory I didn't know I achieved until it was happening. In the light of the pandemic, I've started to call my parents daily. Separately. Mom in the morning, pops in the evening. And it's been nice just to catch up and say hey, especially since neither of them are working. But what I've found with my father is not what I expected. In the light of a global pandemic and a renewed fight for civil rights, we end chatting about anything but the weather. We've bounced from child psychology to redlining neighborhoods to the heyday of WWF wrestling to the return of national sports. And on more than one occasion, I've been surprised in the best way possible. I don't know if it's age or grandchildren or something different in his diet, but he has softened. Or at least tried to see some things from another perspective. It's subtle but it means something.
With that being said, check out some of the best links I found this week:
It's been so long since the days of Step Brothers, Tropic Thunder, and Pineapple Express. It's hard to accept that they might not come back.
Andrew Kirby makes a case that habits are overrated and we should instead make the main thing the main thing.
Sometimes I feel like if I've seen one parkour video, I've seen them all, but this New York Rooftop POV footage had me locked in as soon as it started.
Mark Manson on How Information Overload Can Destroy Your Mind
Nerdwriter never fails and when he decides to tackle action director John Woo, you know you're in for a treat.
Until next time...