I’m currently reading Alan Jacob’s Breaking Bread with the Dead, a book about how an understanding of the past can inform a wiser understanding of the present, which I discovered in putting together 4 Ideas to Understand the Present Through the Lens of the Past. In the early part of the book, Jacobs discusses how exhausted our minds have become through relentless sorting of daily information. On the use of the word triage in the first chapter:

Triage—it’s a French word meaning to separate and sort—is what nurses and doctors on the battlefield do: during and after a battle, as wounded soldiers flow in, the limited resources of a medical unit are sorely tested. the medial staff must learn to make instantaneous judgements: this person needs treatment now, that one can wait a little while, a third one will have to wait longer, preferably somewhere other than the medical tent. To the wounded soldiers, this system will often seem peremptory and harsh, in compassionate, and perhaps even cruel; but it’s absolutely necessary for the nurses and doctors to be ruthlessly risk. They cannot afford for one soldier to die while they’re comforting one whose injuries don’t threaten his life.

Sounds like my email every morning, not to mention social media. What to like, what to comment on, what to ignore. Who has become radicalized and needs to be snoozed from my feed for a month. It's not just email and social media that overload our decision-making apparatus, but so much of what gets thrown to us on a regular day.

Jacobs continues:

Navigating daily life in the internet age is a lot like doing battlefield triage. Given that what cultural critic Matthew Crawford calls the “attentional commons” is constantly noisy—there are days we can’t even put gas in our cars without being assaulted by advertisements blared at ear-rattling volume—we also learn to be ruthless in deciding how to deploy our attention. We only have so much of it, and often the decision of whether or not to “pay” it must be made in an instant. To avoid madness we must learn to reject appeals to our time, and reject them without hesitation or pity. 

Over the long term, this kind of information overload can create dependency and suffering at the same time that it is pleasurable. The emotional triggers of news and social media are reprogramming people at both ends of the political spectrum, and that kind of activity is highly profitable for news and media companies.

Jon Mitchell in Social Media: It’s Worse Than I Thought:

Channel surfing isn’t that different from doomscrolling. Smartphones and social media just provide a significant but incremental user experience upgrade to the same basic torture device. It’s still a calibrated mass hypnosis machine that entices a human being in repose to dissolve all will and intelligent response and just absorb a profit-driven facsimile of human society and one’s place in it from the minimal ironic distance necessary to reassure one that one is freely choosing to participate.

One way to counteract this constant barrage is to consume information with much greater intentionality so that we can regain our ability to focus. I really like the best practices mentioned in Anne-Laure Le Cunff's article on selective ignorance, which involve curating our information sources much more wisely, cutting back on our use of social media, as well as adding equal doses of reflection and fun:

Selective ignorance doesn’t lead to the illusion of knowledge; quite the opposite. By acknowledging that you can’t possibly know everything there is to know, you can decide where to spend your time and energy to cultivate intentional knowledge and stimulating conversations.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Breaking Bread with the Dead over the holidays.

(Image courtesy of Markus Spiske on Unsplash)