Sloths, Idleness, and time for repose and reflection
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
William Wordsworth, 1802.
Yesterday I said today's post would be a warning about potential financial problems ahead, based on the experience of the Lehman Brothers collapse.
Let's wait one day for that.
Cross-country flights on airplanes used to be an enforced oasis of quiet time for passengers. Before the words "airplane mode" meant something specific on a phone, there was the airplane mode reality of sitting in a seat with no responsibilities. We were in enforced isolation. Everyone on the outside world understood that. The passenger was out of touch for those hours and one shouldn’t expect otherwise. A passenger could read quietly or nap or do quiet work without interruption. It was an oasis from the world.
Then progress happened. Now one can be as plugged into the bustling world on an airplane as anywhere else, with phones, high-speed internet, movies. The connected world crashed into that repose. William Wordsworth observed the industrial revolution crashing into pastoral England. John Coster observed the world entering airplane mode while he read yesterday's "Easy Sunday" post about the quiet lives of sloths. The world is too much with us, Coster wrote.
Coster has been doing cross-country travel for decades. He grew up in Massachusetts and lives in Seattle. His 44-year career has included developing dozens of global data centers for major technology companies. He currently manages an engineering and technology innovation team for T-Mobile. He was on a plane, fully plugged in, and he wrote me this while frustrated trying to get the buggy blogspot comment feature to record a comment.
Guest Post by John Coster
I’m sitting on a plane with my free T-Mobile wifi, but for some reason I can’t get my app to comment.
Your post about sloths got me thinking about how unconcerned sloths must be about what they can neither comprehend nor change. It also got me wondering about why we humans obsess about things we cannot fully comprehend or over which we have no real agency. I was reminded when Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan wrote that he reads or listens to news about once a week because more frequency does not help him be better informed about things that matter. In fact, he thought connecting with news at a higher frequency creates an outsized sense of importance and urgency in our minds. So more frequency is antithetical to understanding. And that was back in 2007.
In pre-digital times, it was considered a sign of curiosity and intelligence to be “well-read,” to be a person of “the world.” There was a cannon of publications and general news sources that were considered reliable. That’s ancient history of course.
We are all increasingly bombarded with unwelcome notifications and alerts on our digital devices. Yes, I know you can turn them off, but that’s my point. You need to opt out, to unsubscribe, to filter to junk, or otherwise disable the default of connection. But I can’t do that with its ubiquity everywhere else. I walk through my office at work (and every conference room) and public spaces have flat screens and digital billboards. They scream for our attention with all manner of “important” information and never-ending news reports, often replaying the same footage of the ‘catastrophe-o’ -the-day’. My favorites are the Money-shows, with well-dressed, serious-looking people, in high-tech studios explaining our complex financial world with great (but dubious) certainty, while streams of market prices and news bites race across the bottom. You can’t blink.
Taleb was right. I’ve never felt more distracted, inclined to worry, and truly uninformed in my life.
The sloth’s life looks pretty cool. We both meet the same end, but the sloth has a more chill ride. But of course I want to be informed, but especially with AI producing even more content, how do we choose what fills our gray matter?
Tomorrow, back to the connected world, with charts and intimations of problems ahead. It's the future. We won't know until it happens.