My brain is too small. I cannot remember passwords, phone numbers, and appointments. Names escape me. I cannot find my car keys. Ah, jeez, what did I eat for dinner last night?
No, I’m not afflicted with early stage dementia. The malady must be something like future shock, the overwhelming stress that produces paralysis when confronting too much—too much change, too much information, too many choices. When using a search engine to get directions on how to build a kite, I discover 15,300,000 hits—too much to crowd into my small head. Naturally, faced with too much, I choose to do nothing. That may not be sensible, but what should one do when stunned with too much of everything? No, I cannot subscribe to the notion that too much is never enough. The thought itself is too much.
Look online or in your favorite magazine. You will find an epidemic of grabbers that rely on the old number tease: “Five Things To Do Before You Die,” “Four Things a Cheating Spouse Does,” “Six Frequent Income Tax Mistakes,” “Seven Best Vacation Spots in Washington state,” and “Five Best Burger Joints in Tacoma.”
Short lists have captured people’s attention for centuries: Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Eightfold Way, Seven Holy Virtues, Four Noble Truths, and so on.
Why?
Faced with the snags of daily life, many of us look for shortcuts. Who wouldn’t? In order to understand a topic or problem, the quickest way for a reader to wade through the tsunami of daunting data that engulfs us is the short list. In-depth understanding takes time and it’s hard work. So we often opt for the quick fix, the overview, the snatch and go. About the time that the trite expression “bottom line” popped from my neighbors’ mouths, I began to notice the new paths that cut through the unknown.
A comprehensive assessment requires more than an overview, but who has the time? I suppose we want that bottom line right now, if not sooner, because it is hard to concentrate. It is wrong to assume that ADHD now afflicts most adults (it does not), but in trying to cope with the world of meta-information, we look for those timesavers and easy answers to complicated issues.
And now we have multimedia galore, a caboodle-Google of it. Used to be that newspapers, television, and radio had the corner on breaking stories. Not anymore. Before we have a chance to get the dope on the big story, our mobile devices ding with “Breaking News.” And if that news gets complex, it seems sensible to read the thumbnail piece titled “Five Superstars and Their Big Secrets.”
But with that diversional quick fix comes a fractional guilt, at least for me it does. I think of Thoreau’s advice—to avoid squandering time. “Our life,” he wrote, “is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!” So do I look up an article titled “The Six Ways to Simplify One’s Life,” or should I chuck guru advice, turn off the devices, take a walk along Ruston Way in the rain?
Where did I leave my raincoat?