An annoyingly non-technical (but rivetingly lyrical and anecdotal) story here about the dangers, costs, and futility of multitasking.
The abiding, distinctive feature of all crashes, whether in stock prices, housing values, or hit-TV-show ratings, is that they startle but don’t surprise. When the euphoria subsides, when the volatile graph lines of excitability flatten and then curve down, people realize, collectively and instantly (and not infrequently with some relief), that they’ve been expecting this correction. The signs were everywhere, the warnings clear, the researchers in rough agreement, and the stories down at the bar and in the office (our own stories included) revealed the same anxieties.
Which explains why the busts and reversals we deem inevitable are also the least preventable, and why they startle us, if briefly, when they come—because they were inevitable for so long that they should have come already. That they haven’t, we reason, can mean only one of two things. Thanks to technology or some other magic, we’ve entered a new age when the laws of cause and effect (as propounded by Isaac Newton and Adam Smith) have yielded to the principle of dream-and-make-it-happen (as manifested by Steve Jobs and Oprah). Either that, or the thing that went up and up and up and hasn’t come down, though it should have long ago, is being held aloft by our decision to forget it’s up there and to carry on as though it weren’t.
But on to the next inevitable contraction that everybody knows is coming, believes should have come a couple of years ago, and suspects can be postponed only if we pay no attention to the matter and stay very, very busy. I mean the end of the decade we may call the Roaring Zeros—these years of overleveraged, overextended, technology-driven, and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human energies in the dream of infinite connectivity. The overdoses, freak-outs, and collapses that converged in the late ’60s to wipe out the gains of the wide-eyed optimists who set out to “Be Here Now” but ended up making posters that read “Speed Kills” are finally coming for the wired utopians who strove to “Be Everywhere at Once” but lost a measure of innocence, or should have, when their manic credo convinced us we could fight two wars at the same time.
The Multitasking Crash.
The Attention-Deficit Recession.
I finished reading it while on the phone, keeping an eye on my e-mails, pondering notes for a safety presentation I have to give, and setting up an appointment for another discussion …