American Mania!

From the NY Times:

[The] United States is full of energetic risk-takers because it's full of immigrants, who as a group may carry a genetic marker that expresses itself as restless curiosity, exuberance and competitive self-promotion - a combination known as hypomania.Even when times are hard ... most people don't leave their homelands. The 2 percent or so who do are a self-selecting group. What distinguishes them ... might be the genetic makeup of their dopamine-receptor system - the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.

This may explain why everyone I know has a multi-tasking capacity bordering on ADHD. This quest for stimuli, challenge, new experience, new challenges etc. leads me to wonder what the workplace of the future will be like. My belief: a lot like playing X-Box Live, 24 hours a day, broken up by little naps and brisk walks around the block. You'd be in constant contact with your buddy list -- even in sleep -- and life we would take on the character of a dive down the psychedelic pipes of 2001: A Space Odyssey while requiring the making of billions of life-or-death decisions every five seconds.

Or it would just suck.