The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
William Wordsworth, 1802.
Yesterday I said today's post would be a warning about potential financial problems ahead, based on the experience of the Lehman Brothers collapse.
Let's wait one day for that.
Cross-country flights on airplanes used to be an enforced oasis of quiet time for passengers. Before the words "airplane mode" meant something specific on a phone, there was the airplane mode reality of sitting in a seat with no responsibilities. We were in enforced isolation. Everyone on the outside world understood that the passenger was out of touch for those hours. The passenger could read quietly or nap or do quiet work without interruption. It was an oasis from the world.
Then progress happened. Now one can be as plugged into the bustling world on an airplane as anywhere else, with phones, high-speed internet, movies. The connected world crashed into that repose. William Wordsworth observed the industrial revolution crashing into pastoral England. John Coster observed the busy world invading airplane mode while he read yesterday's "Easy Sunday" post about the quiet lives of sloths. The world is too much with us, Coster wrote.
Coster has been doing cross-country travel for decades. He grew up in Massachusetts and lives in Seattle. His 44-year career has included developing dozens of global data centers for major technology companies. He currently manages an engineering and technology innovation team for T-Mobile. He was on a plane, fully plugged in, and he wrote me this while frustrated trying to get the buggy blogspot comment feature to record a comment.
Guest Post by John Coster
I’m sitting on a plane with my free T-Mobile wifi, but for some reason I can’t get my app to comment.Your post about sloths got me thinking about how unconcerned sloths must be about what they can neither comprehend nor change. It also got me wondering about why we humans obsess about things we cannot fully comprehend or over which we have no real agency. I was reminded when Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan wrote that he reads or listens to news about once a week because more frequency does not help him be better informed about things that matter. In fact, he thought connecting with news at a higher frequency creates an outsized sense of importance and urgency in our minds. So more frequency is antithetical to understanding. And that was back in 2007.
In pre-digital times, it was considered a sign of curiosity and intelligence to be “well-read,” to be a person of “the world.” There was a cannon of publications and general news sources that were considered reliable. That’s ancient history of course.
We are all increasingly bombarded with unwelcome notifications and alerts on our digital devices. Yes, I know you can turn them off, but that’s my point. You need to opt out, to unsubscribe, to filter to junk, or otherwise disable the default of connection. But I can’t do that with its ubiquity everywhere else. I walk through my office at work (and every conference room) and public spaces have flat screens and digital billboards. They scream for our attention with all manner of “important” information and never-ending news reports, often replaying the same footage of the ‘catastrophe-o’ -the-day’. My favorites are the Money-shows, with well-dressed, serious-looking people, in high-tech studios explaining our complex financial world with great (but dubious) certainty, while streams of market prices and news bites race across the bottom. You can’t blink.
Taleb was right. I’ve never felt more distracted, inclined to worry, and truly uninformed in my life.
The sloth’s life looks pretty cool. We both meet the same end, but the sloth has a more chill ride. But of course I want to be informed, but especially with AI producing even more content, how do we choose what fills our gray matter?
Tomorrow, back to the connected world, with charts and intimations of problems ahead. It's the future. We won't know until it happens.
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8 comments:
Back in the day, I was given a smart phone for my job. When I retired, I decided there was nothing I needed to look up or hear about that couldn’t wait until I got home. I also had no interest in social media. As a result, I couldn’t care less what Elon Musk does to Twitter or Congress does to TikTok. Remaining connected 24/7 is a choice. In my mind, it’s a poor one. Planes are for paperbacks.
The U.S. economy is expected to fall into a recession later this year, said a majority of economists surveyed in an influential semi-annual poll.
Fifty-eight percent of economists said they expect the economy to be in a recession to begin this year, according to the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) Policy Survey.
The largest share—24 percent—said they expect the recession to begin in the third quarter of this year. Sixteen percent said they expect the recession to begin in the second quarter, which begins at the end of this week as April starts. Another 13 percent said the recession will begin in the fourth quarter of this year.
Five percent said they believe the economy is already in a recession. That’s down significantly from the 19 percent who expressed the view that the economy was currently in a recession when asked in the August survey.
Twelve percent expect a recession to start in the first half of next year. Twenty-two percent said they expect no recession until the second half of next year or later.
“More than half of NABE Policy Survey panelists expect a recession at some point in 2023,” said NABE President Julia Coronado, president and founder, MacroPolicy Perspectives LLC.
I once read about a woman who went off to an isolated island for six months to try to write a novel. She was completely cut off from all news. She said that when she came back after the six months, she was amazed to discover how little she had missed during that time; all of the same issues were in approximately all of the same places.
It’s a good idea to step back out of our emotional/psychic entanglement with the issues that engage/enrage us. I have been having some success in that with meditation. Not that I am anywhere close to being The Buddha Incarnate… 🪷🕉️😀
I’ve gone on digital sabbaticals too Michael, and it is cathartic, but when you come back, you still have a bewildering amount of mind-numbing voices thrust at you.
… but when you come back, you still have a bewildering amount of mind-numbing voices thrust at you.
And then, when you try to have a conversation with those voices, many of them will hear what they were already thinking instead of what you were trying to say to them. And it goes the other way too, of course.
With our current level of Internet-enabled communications technology, we have built our very own Tower of Babel, and the Gods have punished us for building that tower by making it impossible for us to understand each other.
It’s true that some things never change. Back in 1998, there was a mass shooting at a school in Salem. I’ve lost track of how many there have been since, but we just had another today in Nashville. Every time something like this happens, Democrats want to ban assault rifles, high-capacity magazines and require universal background checks. Republicans always counter with a plan more acceptable to the NRA: offer thoughts and prayers. And so it goes…and goes and goes and goes. Everything old is new again.
I write this while on a bus after touring France's St. Emilion wine region with friends.
Do I need to stay connected? Sometimes yes, especially with the spontaneous strikes occuring throughout France in recent weeks.
A few days ago, before landing in Paris, I got an alert that our train to Bordeaux had been canceled. We had come a few days early just in case something disrupted our plans. Being connected let me book several contingencies to get there on time. I passed on that info to others in our group who were on their way here from different areas of the US.
Sure, reading a book might be more relaxing, but being connected let me overcome the strike action, making for more quiet time to enjoy our vacation.
Sure, that tech doesn't always work. As a techie, I can usually overcome the obstacles that might stop others.
At the end of our vacation, we have a tight schedule. What happens if train or plane travel is impeded and we can't get back in time to pick up the grandkids, so my son and daughter-in-law can finish their studies this semester.
Fortunately, being connected, I can keep them informed, and make alternate plans.
Throwing up my hands won't help. Being tech savvy made it easy to overcome those obstacles so we could enjoy our vacation with friends
Stay disconnected? No way. Solving problems and helping others brings me joy.
I just wish I could have helped Oregon more while I lived there, and made me what I am today.
PS regardless of what I wrote above, I do use that connection ability to read. I pay for several newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and we use our Kindles a lot!
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