Information Overload

We continually hear people say that they don’t have time to do the things they want to anymore. Self-made gurus make a small fortune out of ‘teaching’ us how to make the most of our time, how to prioritise and focus to achieve maximum return for our energy. However most of us should not need this woolly mumbo jumbo that they drown us with.

If we step back a little and compare our lives to the lives our parents lived, the obvious difference is information. The world today expects that we are intimately interested in an airport strike 8 time-zones away, that we have to know about the price of bananas in Ecuador, that a farmers’ protest in France has a direct impact on our lives. The world is wrong – we don’t NEED to know any of this information.

Humanity has survived quite well over the last few millennia with local knowledge only, and some global information filtering in slowly. But now we are told that we must keep up, find out, follow what is going on – everywhere, on every topic, right now! Whole industries have been set up to gather obscure, irrelevant information and pour it out of our TV screens and along our internet cables. Why do the numbers of media representatives watching & recording any conflict often outnumber the actual participants in the conflict? Because they seem to think that it is important that the rest of the world know whether some Afghan warlord is picking his nose or not.

When we look at our lives and try to find more time for ourselves, we seem to find that there are no optional activities for us to cut out. We have to read the newspaper, we have to watch the TV series on exploring the upper Guyana river systems looking for new animal species, we have to work out what impact the increased price of Australian copper will have on our mortgage interest rate. We have to take in all this information, process it and act on it. And work out whether yesterday’s actions were the right ones. And forecast what is going to happen tomorrow that we need to prepare for.

No wonder we have no time left for ourselves – to go hiking, read a good book, play with our children, improve our relationship with our partners, to smell the flowers. All these things must take a back seat to dealing with the information overload.

All of this leads into the next step on our downward spin – having to deal with the mental and health fallout of not managing the information processing. The ‘diseases’ such as depression, stress, ADHD, nervous breakdowns, are all modern symptoms of not dealing with the reality as the world expects us to. These diseases have only appeared in the last half-century or so when the flow of information really started to explode.

I wonder – should I package this lot up into a book and sell it? I could retire early, and spend some more time on myself!!

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Tags: ADHD, depression, information overload, mental health, news, personal time, smell the flowers, stress