With mobile technology, it’s too easy to get caught up in a pellet mentality – obsessively checking email, pulling out the PDA whenever there’s a spare ten seconds. When we buy into hyperconnectivity, we too often disconnect from the reality in front of us. Even when we put the digital device down, we’re distracted thinking about the status update or gloomy news story we just read. The constant state of interrupted thinking becomes addictive to our vigilant hunter-gatherer brains and can leave us feeling jangled and exhausted for no good reason. When this happens, the digital realm isn’t a convenience to us anymore. It’s a burden.
Get back in control of your time and energy. Set practical boundaries for your media usage, and situate your mind in the present concrete reality. You’ll enjoy what you’ve been missing.
--Mark Sisson, Slow Life Down
Being "connected" is toxic to creative work. It takes long periods of uninterrupted thought to write competently. Even the short posts I write here at QWT take hours to conceive, write and phrase properly.
You are toast as a creative person if you let yourself get distracted by the conveniences of the modern connected world.
And yet it's so easy to just... let it happen. The internet is always there, offering constant a constant supply of news, blog posts, images, porn, Facebook, and thousands of other ways to waste our time. You don't even have to try, and you can while away hours, even days, without thought or planning.
One more thought: How often have you been out, enjoying a dinner in a nice restaurant for example, and taken a moment to look around at all the people around you staring at glowing blue rectangles? Is the stuff out there on the internet really that important?
Things that seem important often aren't.
There's some good news here, however. As more people become hypnotized by hyperconnectivity and find themselves disconnected from the real world, the easier it becomes for those of us left who still can disconnect. And we'll be the ones doing all the useful creative work.
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