Most of us think about events in terms of stories. We may not know the terms, but they take the form of a narrative structure of exposition, ignition, rising action, climax, aftermath, resolution – questions answered, endings ended, and time for the next narrative. That life does not really look like this doesn’t matter – much of the time we do not know how something begins or what sets the flame to the fuse, or exactly what transpires at the peak of the action. We rarely get the full story of what comes after. We always miss so many of the consequent threads. Life is a mess. We try to shape it into a logical structure.
Now add to the ordinary mess of Life the gigabytes of information we are exposed to everyday, the impossibility of following all of that, let alone deeply understanding even a fraction of a fraction of it, and the erosion of our attention spans under such an onslaught.
Think about how quickly news stories move on, how rapidly the focus shifts, how easily entertained we have become and thus how much more demanding of stimulation, endlessly changing, colorful, edited in faster and faster bits of time.
Unless something happens directly to us or in our vicinity – a tornado touching down and a street wiped out, a carjacking, a cancer diagnosis, a wedding, birth, breakup, a friend in trouble, a bonus, a puppy, an upset at work … we move on very quickly to the next headline. In other words, information about the wider world, the world well beyond our personal lives, dissipates at enormous speed – the comfort of stories with all their beginnings, middles and endings no longer applies. Now that wider world arrives in fragments and in jolts that are losing their energy to shake us.
In such an information environment, how do we ever begin to see the effects bearing down upon us of causes we have forgotten about?
We know things are bad – Trump, Putin, Ukraine, Epstein, Israel, Gaza, extinctions, wildfires, floods, billionaires, surveillance, heat, poverty, homelessness, the ascendency of morons in every walk of life, AI, oligarchs, autocracy – how do we begin to chart all the effects racing toward us from these causes alone?
Maybe that is the underlying reason for our increasing collective unease, our insomnia and escalating anxieties and source less anger, our sense of everything spinning out of control. It is not that we have become blind and deaf – we have access to sights and sounds previous generations could not have imagined having been within their grasp. It is that we are not built to handle the speed and volume of all those images and videos and events and ideas and every single device screaming PAY ATTENTION PAY ATTENTION PAY ATTENTION.
I’ve been thinking about the dread most wrestle with now, that sense of an ending, but I wonder if any great event will keep its energy long enough to throw us out of our general passivity and shortened attention spans and into action. Maybe whatever is coming arrives in scraps and bits or in one enormous wave, but maybe it won’t matter how it arrives. We’ll be shocked, horrified, appalled until a day later, or two or three, when another cluster of sensations takes its place. Perhaps we will be escorted to our doom by subdued whimpers and 15 second flashes of that hour’s TikTok trend.
