Saturday 14 March 2015

jam tomorrow and jam yesterday

Indeed, attention is probably the scarcest resource there is—at least by our own estimation, as we absolutely rush, harried through our daily routines, ushered by those gadgets designed to be more fleet of foot and to help us help ourselves—but surely it’s a cultural quirk, a weakness or vanity that can be appealed to like any insecurity.

As with any other matter of pride or conceit, there is a price to pay—perhaps not so obvious to the buyer and beholder, whereas it might be mockingly apparent to those outside looking in. The family of inmates—I think, is growing. This essay from ร†on Magazine certainly gives pause and make one think about the idea of allotted time. Technology is both a flatterer and a heckler—our schedules, how we use time, has probably never been allowed to be so idiosyncratic, and yet there’s a dual passage of it, both incredibly slow and incredibly fast and with the same seconds, minutes and hours to savour as before, that synchronises very disparate agendas. Innovation, even when made to bear awful burdens of chauvinism, covetousness and myopia, is not imagination and generally re-enforces the society that creates it. Far from the great, relentless oppressor its easy to characterise it to be, those productivity tools that are sometimes thrust upon us (but usually willingly accepted and even sought out), and just insistent reminders of what’s left yet to be done (or what could be done) and closed-out. It is OK to leave something pending—and has been always, although ignorance or forgetfulness can no longer be substituted for avoidance and procrastination.