Life in the World Today
You wake up overwhelmed, your mind already projecting forward into the day to analyze the many struggles you will face in the next 16 hours. Each item on your task list spirals out fractally, and you know that everything you've planned to do will take twice as long to accomplish. You think back to the quaint days before email, before the Internet, before you could be contacted anywhere at anytime, and wonder what it was like to work in an office without a computer, where projects were requested by rotary phone or through the postal service and coffee could only be purchased in cans in the back of the supermarket.
But now.
Now you have said yes to a slew of projects which a poor farmer would have laughed at. The majority of them consist of writing a few sentences here, tabulating a few numbers there, and waiting for a tiny electronic device halfway around the world to process a message you've written to a friend you met in high school.
"Take my plow and plow for a day," he'd say, chuckling, and you'd give him your thirteen post-it notes and your box full of unanswered email and wish him luck.
For the poor farmer is forgetting that the brain requires the most energy out of any organ in the body. He is forgetting that what seem like easy tasks--pay the cable bill, finish the blog post, download the spam filter and update the spreadsheet program--require more exertion than the building of the pyramids. For these are not simple A to B, "apply pressure here" efforts, but endless acts of impossible Choice.
Never before have humans been faced with so many choices. In a life that once boiled down to two or three per day, we walk now down the shopping aisles of the world, being asked to make hundreds of choices at a time, our wild brains considering the minutea of ingredient lists, nutrition information, microeconomics, and brand allegiance. So many factors, so little time, so many more things to buy.
Within ten minutes, the poor farmer is approaching you out in the field, begging for his plow back.
"There were simply too many variables," he tells you, "and I didn't know which way was up and which way was down."
Your brief respite in the field showed you what he was missing. It was simple, really: push hard, thrust with endurance, and let your mind wander towards thoughts of the Lord. In the cities, in the far away places, big decisions were being made, but these you would not have to learn of for decades on end. What seemed like Austerity to your laptop-bound and overtasked brainiac self, was simply the Fact of Life to the farmer side of your soul.
"Please, the plow."
You hand it back, and unstick the Post-Its from his dirty, gnarled fingers, cursing him under your breathe.
"But what about television?" you ask after him as he turns back towards his field. "What about Wikipedia? And fashion magazines? And 38 kinds of cheese?"
"They were interesting," says the farmer, "But they were not for me. I know better than to put my poor brain into that sort of swamp. I'll take the open air, if you don't mind."
And with that, he waves, and shovels off into the sunset.
But now.
Now you have said yes to a slew of projects which a poor farmer would have laughed at. The majority of them consist of writing a few sentences here, tabulating a few numbers there, and waiting for a tiny electronic device halfway around the world to process a message you've written to a friend you met in high school.
"Take my plow and plow for a day," he'd say, chuckling, and you'd give him your thirteen post-it notes and your box full of unanswered email and wish him luck.
For the poor farmer is forgetting that the brain requires the most energy out of any organ in the body. He is forgetting that what seem like easy tasks--pay the cable bill, finish the blog post, download the spam filter and update the spreadsheet program--require more exertion than the building of the pyramids. For these are not simple A to B, "apply pressure here" efforts, but endless acts of impossible Choice.
Never before have humans been faced with so many choices. In a life that once boiled down to two or three per day, we walk now down the shopping aisles of the world, being asked to make hundreds of choices at a time, our wild brains considering the minutea of ingredient lists, nutrition information, microeconomics, and brand allegiance. So many factors, so little time, so many more things to buy.
Within ten minutes, the poor farmer is approaching you out in the field, begging for his plow back.
"There were simply too many variables," he tells you, "and I didn't know which way was up and which way was down."
Your brief respite in the field showed you what he was missing. It was simple, really: push hard, thrust with endurance, and let your mind wander towards thoughts of the Lord. In the cities, in the far away places, big decisions were being made, but these you would not have to learn of for decades on end. What seemed like Austerity to your laptop-bound and overtasked brainiac self, was simply the Fact of Life to the farmer side of your soul.
"Please, the plow."
You hand it back, and unstick the Post-Its from his dirty, gnarled fingers, cursing him under your breathe.
"But what about television?" you ask after him as he turns back towards his field. "What about Wikipedia? And fashion magazines? And 38 kinds of cheese?"
"They were interesting," says the farmer, "But they were not for me. I know better than to put my poor brain into that sort of swamp. I'll take the open air, if you don't mind."
And with that, he waves, and shovels off into the sunset.
posted by Paul S. at
10:11 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home