While reflecting on the process of childrearing, I stumbled across the notion that we all too often approach life a formula to be solved. School, college, job, consumption, marriage, family. Wash, rinse, repeat. The structure of life presented in a bare bones outline that is meant to bring guidance.
Life, like education, is not fully formed unless it is balanced. What good is it to read and not be able to perform addition or perform addition and not read? To fully function in life, you must have a degree of balance. How do we find this balance in a world that is afflicted with that I would deem as the quickening syndrome?
First, to expound briefly on what I mean by the quickening syndrome. Since the advent of the telegraph, man has continued to master technological communications. Telegraph, telephone, radio, television, dial-up internet, email, high speed internet, social media, smart phone, the Internet of Things…That’s about where we are right now. Communication now comes from a plethora of angles and, if we choose, can be received by us all day long.
Messaging is a form of communication. The transmission of messages conveys to us information in which we discern some form of meaning. Know, buy, support, reject, act on this, that and another thing. What we have today is a buffet of ideas (messages) that ended up on our proverbial kitchen table. How do we choose and not be overwhelmed, distracted, and confused?
Choice as a positive factor in our lives, is only as good as our ability to decern between the choices given. What good is it to have 50 different shades of blue? Abundance of choice can be paralyzing and lead to the softening of ones decision making skills. Again, where is the balance?
Our inability to control the level and amount of communication we are being fed leads to an imbalance and therefore disturbs whatever structure we implicit or explicitly believe life should follow. A barrage of communication crowds out the brain’s ability to have a sense of quiet and generate self-reflective thought.
I believe this crowding out of reflective thought further leads to the ‘formula’ of life being seen as a formula; something ridged, boring and confining. You do not want to be in a physical jail or a mental one either. When you’re constantly in the ‘here and now’ your ability to think long-term and reflect on the past as a learning tool becomes negated. This is the challenge of our time.
People do not want to become robots, but have a tendency to drift in that direction when using robotic tools all day. They don’t want their life to be a formula, even thought they might freely choose to take the same route when they reflect and think about what path they really want to follow.
If we cannot manage the information or choices provided to us throughout the day, then what good is choice or information? Are we on a pathway to achieving what we truly want or on a quest to rack ourselves with anxiety?
Life may look like a formula, but should not feel like a formula. Information can be abundant like food, yet we don’t need to by choice or force shove it down our throats until we bust. We need structure to live, yet we do not need the techno-structure to dictate how our life structure should look, feel, and behave.