Inputs and the Information Firing Squad

Genius Loci readers:

For reasons you’ll read about below, October felt full. Not in the satisfied, wholesome sense. In the uncomfortable, bloated, sick-to-your-stomach sense. After a personal update, I’ll share some thoughts on the modern condition of having too many input channels.

Personal Update

Despite feeling overwhelmed, I’ve managed to get some work done. I published three articles on my website, all on the On Mountains sub-site. Two articles involved my Bolivia work. I posted an overview of the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña, and an article detailing how the Festival blends indigenous cosmology, Catholic devotion, and political authority. I also wrote a piece tracing the evolution of sacred space in the Torah.

I also published an interview with Lance Richardson about True Nature, his new biography of Peter Matthiessen, on my Creative Journeys podcast. The book is worth a read. Also check out Ryan Murdock’s interview with Richardson on his Personal Landscapes podcast.

What will November bring? With any luck, I’ll carve out time for more work amidst the overwhelm described below.

Last month I said I would write about mountains in Kālidāsa’s Sanskrit epic The Birth of Kumára, but the book hasn’t budged from the top of my to-be-read pile. I doubt I’ll be able to resist its beautiful seaglass green color for much longer. Unless another shiny object catches my attention, the Kālidāsa work will start when I’m done making sense of my notes on mountains in Dante’s Commedia.

The Information Firing Squad

It is difficult, if not impossible, for someone to live and work optimally when they have too many inputs. By “input” I mean: information that enters into a system and demands processing.

In many cases, the problem is not the quantity of information but the quantity of channels of information.

Think of those challenge games where a ball runs through a metal track — like a miniature roller coaster — and a participant must grab the ball as it exits a chute and reintroduce it into the track. The participant, who has one hand tied behind his back, loses the game if he drops a ball. A new ball is introduced into the track every few minutes, making the challenge increasingly difficult. One ball is easy to manage. A second complicates the game a bit. A third requires concentration. A fourth… there’s always a breaking point. One ball too many ensures that all the balls fall to the ground. Now imagine the balls don’t get introduced on a predictable schedule. And instead of falling out of one chute, they can fall out of one of several and often at the same time. This is the world we find ourselves in, a challenge game that is impossible to manage, much less win.

We have too many inputs in our lives, too many balls to juggle. We have too many touch points.

Reflect, for a second, on your input channels. Mine might look similar to yours. At work, faculty have two different email inboxes, one for admin and one for students. We have meetings that occur on Teams, Zoom, and irl for a variety of committees and initiatives. We have department meetings, faculty assembly meetings, committee meetings, policy meetings, student meetings. We have meetings to plan for meetings. We have a few information dump (“communication”) channels like instructional spaces and a proprietary message board, both with relentless pings and notifications. Sometimes we use Google Docs to share and “collaborate,” other times we use OneDrive and Microsoft 365. On top of that, we have classes to teach and homework to grade. This is just at my day job. Add this all to our personal channels for communicating with family and friends: WhatsApp, text messaging, Facebook, Instagram. Add our domestic, life-related channels: snail mail, email. Add our entertainment channels: social media, podcasts, Netflix, traditional media. Add to this our creative interests and their respective input channels. This is not the proverbial “firehose” of information. It is a firing squad.

It is hard to think clearly in this environment. It is near impossible to excel, to live and work optimally and meaningfully, in such a hell. This environment is the human equivalent of a distributed denial-of-service attack — too many requests and the system shuts down.

In a recent post, Craig Mod wrote

It’s impossible to be “authentic” (to maintain some kind of “core integrity”) or to access anything resembling “true creativity” when plugged into social media. Social media destroys whatever it is I feel out, alone, in the middle of a big walk, connecting with people, writing, looking closer and closer still at the world.

Social media is of course part of the problem. Smartphones are part of the problem too. They, to use Craig’s phrase, “teleport” us away from the immediacy, the nowness of life. But the problem is much larger than the social media and smartphones. It is a problem born of the so-called “information age.” Too much of anything is bad. The same goes for information, inputs, and everything the contemporary human has to keep in mind and to keep track of. Our brain can’t keep its “mental charge,” as my wife calls the ability to consider the infinitude of modern obligations. It is a distinctly modern condition that seems to be getting worse.

This digital overload is a bad LSD trip, one that shows no signs of letting up. How many more hours of this do I have in store, you ask yourself? How many more days, months, years? When your sanity gets restored, you cannot shake the synthetic aftertaste it leaves in your mouth and that hollow, empty feeling deep in your soul.

Henry David Thoreau, who lived and wrote as the world had begun its sprint towards modernity, had already felt modernity’s deleterious effects. In his book Walden, he wrote:

Still we live meanly, like ants… Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

Thoreau uses the word “detail” here in a negative sense, as unimportant minutiae and the multitude of unessential things that prevent us from enjoying life. In order to succeed in this environment, one must be a “great calculator” of all these details. We must possess sufficient computing power to be able to process all that is coming at us, lest we drown (Thoreau’s metaphor) under its crush.

Later in Walden, Thoreau lampoons those who are addicted to the news in a way that resembles the contemporary affliction of checking a smartphone compulsively: “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’”

If Thoreau teaches us anything about living in the modern world, it is that we can resist the modern world, or at least control for its deleterious effects. We don’t have to play along. We can live in the world and not be of it, if you’ll permit me to borrow the early Christian idea that makes a similar, if spiritual point. We can resist these forces just as we can succumb to them. The injury from the firing squad, it turns out, is a self-inflicted wound. It is punishment for a crime we didn’t have to commit in the first place.

But how does one pull this off?

My impulse is to withdraw as much as possible. To disengage, to pull back, to become a ghost, to turn on “monk mode,” to cut ties, to tune out the noise. But “monk mode” is impossible to do at work. That is, if I want to keep my job.

I suspect that one need not retreat into the woods like a Thoreau-like hermit. One need not renounce civilization, to find some real or spiritual mountain in the middle of the desert like Anthony the Great and the other Desert Fathers. Though, I must admit, the idea does have a nice ring to it.

The general plan of what to do becomes clear when we ask ourselves a simple question: what do we want to do with our lives? Juggle balls or create something interesting? We can’t do both. Taken in this light, it is clear what to do. Sever all but the most important inputs. In short, we need to be thoughtful about our ignorance.

That’s all for this month.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

JB