It’s all a Blur: the information environment and how it’s causing us to sleepwalk through life
We all complain about how hard it is to concentrate amongst all of the noise in the world today. Everything moves so fast and every app we have is designed to keep us distracted. Our brains have adapted to the 24/7 stream of entertainment and information that our phones provide. So much so, that it’s eroded the way we think and focus. We’re always in need of those little bites of dopamine or else we start getting antsy. It’s why we can barely watch movies let alone read a book without checking our notifications. I could dive more deeply into that, but I think I’d rather you read “Stolen Focus” by Johan Hari. That book goes deeper than I ever could. What I want to explore is another side of all that noise. It’s the notion of how our lives not only feel like a blur but also like we’re sleepwalking through them.
No matter how much we do in a day, none of us feel like we really did anything during it. It all runs together, starting with when we wake up. The blur starts with us grasping for our phones, our brains desperate for the feed. Any of us would be hard-pressed to remember a single post we saw when we woke up this morning because we’re not looking for anything specific. We just need any sort of stimulation. We then continue to do it throughout our day. Whenever there’s a down period, out comes the phone again. Downtime like that used to be when we would reflect on the day and cement our experiences. Now those moments that glued our days together are gone. Instead, our days are fractured by everpresent notifications and doomscrolling. Social media isn’t the only problem, the non-stop news cycle also takes a toll. Our brains weren’t designed to process the size and scope of the news stories we see or the rate at which we see them. When we read stories about rising inequality, climate change, or fascism, a part of us shuts down. We care about the issues at hand, but it all seems too big for one person, especially when there's a new emergency every day or even every hour. Those stories paired with everything else we see on social media erode the throughlines of our lives. Without those throughlines, we don’t have much to ground us in our lived experiences, which is what causes that blur feeling. We just bounce from one stimulus to the next.
Our work lives can feel the same way. There’s no unplugging from the modern job. Workers are expected to just keep up with the speed of information. Something we can never do. Trying to keep up doesn’t just burn people out, but makes it harder to feel connected and “awake”. Every day we’re bombarded by emails, slack notifications, and Zoom calls. Again, our brains can’t process all of that information. The best we can do is just try to react to all of the things flying at us. We bounce from one request to the next, and with that, we lose time to be intentional and “awake”. Most people want to find meaning and be thoughtful with their jobs. A job is way more fulfilling when you can take your time with tasks so that you can learn and do your best work. It’s hard to be thoughtful though when you’re expected to move as fast as possible with always shifting goalposts. Instead of reflecting on what we just did, we just have to move on to whatever’s next. Just like with the other parts of life, we don’t have the time we need to connect the moments of our lives. We just live in the blur, operating off instinct and reactions. The work always gets done, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t always feel like that. Some of us are lucky with the roles we have but for many of us, when it’s finally time to call it a day, it can feel like we weren’t conscious for 8-10 hours.
That feeling of not being conscious is what I’m describing by saying we’re sleepwalking. We go through our days trying to keep up with everything and in doing that we’ve stopped being aware of what we’re doing. Things just move too fast and there’s no time to ground ourselves, which makes doing anything with intention harder. How many times have you had to reread something because you realize you have no idea what’s going on despite “reading” all of the words? This sums up the feeling I’m trying to describe, we’re reading all of the words in life but we’re not connecting to them. That’s why it feels like a blur all the time. Our lives have become distant and abstracted. We stare at screens all day using the same programs and apps, day in and day out, for both work and our personal lives. Even if what’s on the screen may slightly vary, we’re still just doing the same thing and it’s all running together. There’s a concept that time moves faster when you’re not having new experiences. When time moves faster you’re not able to be present and awake to the moment. Time is passing by as we lose new experiences to the blur. This is an insane example, but the movie “Click” has some wisdom about this. Adam Sandler chooses to fast forward through life but winds up regretting his decision because of all the time he missed with his family. Our circumstances are different, but I fear something similar will happen to us. Everything will move so fast and be so automated that we’ll miss out on the people in our lives. Our moments together will be degraded because we’ll just be sleepwalking through them.
What got me thinking about all of this was that this past week I felt like I woke up from the blur. I had a jarring experience at work that forced me to reevaluate what I was doing with my time. I realized that I had been “sleepwalking” through my days. My whole thing is being intentional and being human. While I did my best to do just that in different parts of my life, I wasn’t for the hours I was working. I wasn’t being intentional with the choices I was making and was just on auto-pilot. I never wanted to be someone who lives for only 2/7 of their life. No matter how it appeared to those outside of me, something was missing internally. I also think it wasn’t just impacting my professional life but my whole life. You can’t be on auto-pilot all day and then expect to be able to just snap out of it whenever you want. Deep down, I think I knew that I was sleepwalking and that I needed to start making strides to live the life I wanted, not just at work but with everything. That’s why as tough as the experience was I think I needed the wake call.
I’m not saying everyone needs to go through some intense experience to “wake up”. It helps but it shouldn’t be necessary. I hope that what I wrote resonates with you and your experience. It’s easy to go through our days not conscious. There’s so much information and so many things flying at us, that it makes sense that that’s how we are. But I’d guess that you feel like something is missing too. None of us should go to bed at night feeling like our whole day was a blur. More than that, none of us should be on our deathbed feeling like our whole life was a blur. Sadly, that’s how culture is designed at the moment. There’s noise constantly coming at us through social media and the news. Algorithms choose what we read, listen to, and watch, taking autonomy away from us. Our work lives are so fast-paced that we have little time to reflect. Yet, we still have choices. That’s what being human is about. We can make choices about who we want to be and how we want to live. We can be intentional about how we go about our lives. I don’t know what that looks like for you. Maybe take a moment the next time you’re browsing Netflix and think about what you really want to watch. When you wake up, journal or meditate instead of grabbing your phone. Take a minute at work before responding to an email. Maybe take 5 min away from your phone and think about your day. These are all small things but together they add up. Hopefully, over time they can help us be awake to the amazing lives we’re living.