If you look at the global interconnectedness of people, it makes me think of a brain. Every person is a neuron, firing off messages to other neurons, and communicating with each other. And we’re causing our own madness.
Did you know that if a brain has too much interconnectedness, it goes haywire? There’s a theory that schizophrenia is caused by “too many connections” in the brain. And then again there’s a “too few connections”-theory as well. It’s probably both. You see it in our societies: Everyone is connected to everyone at the press of a button, but we don’t have coffee with our neighbors anymore. The connections are all out of whack.
Three generations ago, the boxes that made up society were deemed “bad”. It was bad that some people were rich and some people were poor. It was bad that not everybody had access to education. It was bad that not everyone could do X, Y, Z. Everyone should have the opportunity to do X, Y, Z.
Except a healthy brain doesn’t function that way. Some parts are great at language. Some parts have great spatial skills. Some parts are great at pattern recognition. Some parts are great at executing a task really precisely. And if you mix that up, if every part of the brain should do everything, you are left with no skills. It’s the same with the “everyone in a team should be able to do every task”-sickness that hitched a ride with Agile/Scrum software practices. Life doesn’t work that way. The universe and nature don’t work that way. You specialize, or you die. You necessarily pull back from some areas, like having sharp teeth or being able to run 100 mph, in exchange for opposable thumbs and the ability to grab a stick and poke it into an anthill to get at nutrients. One person on your team is probably great at squeezing the last bit of performance out of a piece of code. If your whole team is like that, your project will get stuck on performance optimizations. (Here’s a controversial opinion: Not everybody should be able to read and write. Not every useful skill requires it and I’d argue that knowing how to read and write will actually make you worse at some skills. Skills our society doesn’t have anymore and that we can’t imagine exist because we’ve suffocated them.)
Right now, everybody is shouting into the void we call the internet. We want to reach everybody with our personal message. Which implies that everyone should receive every message sent by everyone. But you can’t expect everyone to know everything. You specialize. Right now, it’s up to the receiver to filter the signal from the noise, and maybe it has always been that way. There are plenty of people who spout nonsense, even without the internet. The village fool will always exist. The internet hasn’t changed that fact, it has only increased the nonsense’s reach. But it has also increased sense’s reach. We’re unlucky and lucky at the same time.
Now it’s up to us to learn to filter through the information overload and learn to decide when something is important. I know I open social media way too often. But the older I get, the more I shrug and go “Well, that was another waste of five minutes.. oh shit, ten”. And still we do it. Why? I don’t know. Part of it is probably dopamine hunting behavior, but there might also be this inner monkey that goes “Did we check the perimeter?”. And because you’re sitting here in a room behind a computer, the monkey brain doesn’t really understand what you’ve been doing all this time. You’ve been sitting without keeping your eye on the surroundings. But then the robotic part of your brain goes “We should check? Then let’s check the lightbox again”. Wrong end of the stick. Perhaps you should get up and grab a cup of tea instead. Things on your screen aren’t that important, really. Except we, the strangers to you, would insist that that’s not true, of course. I have sensible things to say! Read my blog! Don’t have surgery, stop eating crap, get back to God! I have information that I wish I had known twenty years ago and now I should shove it down somebody else’s throat in order to save them from my fate. Aren’t you the lucky reader. Maybe I should charge you money. Except, while I’m doing that, I’m not paying attention to the steering wheel of my own life. And so, finally, after 40+ years, I learned to keep my eyes on the road. I still stray, at times, but I’ve learned that I have to stay in my own lane.
People are bad at staying in their own lane. Why post this? Why have a blog at all? For myself. That’s the ugly truth of it all and the only reason I am now able to blog and keep up blogging. I’m not here to improve your life. I’m not aiming to impress anyone. I’m writing to figure out what the hell I’m thinking, and I’m reminding myself to keep my eyes on my own road. Whenever anyone posts anything, it should be from internal motivation, not from the sense that someone else will benefit (or that we will benefit from somebody else benefitting, or… <recursion here>). External motivation isn’t sustainable, ask any burned out therapist who thought they’d be helping people and getting a good feeling in return. You can’t help people. And you can’t expect anything in return for a task, certainly not happiness. You discover happiness. You can only help yourself. And that is in fact what most of us are doing. We’re trying to help ourselves. If someone else finds it useful, that’s a bonus.
When someone is sending a message into the void, and it reaches your eyeballs, there’s generally only one question to ask: Is this useful to me?
We were trained to receive anything that was given to us, and to give anything that was asked of us. That’s what school does. You can’t speak until you’re given the turn. And when you are given the turn, you must speak. You must raise your hand before answering the question. You must raise your hand before you can go to the bathroom. If they say no, they expect you not to go. This training erodes the sense of healthy selfishness. Everybody wants your eyeballs. And you were trained to hand them over. So now, everybody who has crap all to say, gets to say it and you’re obediently reading their messages. Especially when someone else insists that their message is useful, or worse, deserves attention, it’s probably not important to you. Don’t let their priorities claim yours. The task to filter out information that is unimportant to you starts today. Yes, there are gold nuggets of information out there. I’ve found some, and so can you. But you can’t filter out gold if you allow the dirt and the rocks to stay in your dish, too. Gold panning is when you take a flat pan, put water and dirt in there, and swirl it around so that the gold sinks to the bottom and the dirt washes away. Yes, maybe we have to sift through the dirt for a long time, before we find some gold. But the important bit is not how long it takes. The important bit is to remember to flush away the dirt.