Text Messaging is Hurting My Quality of Life

"For he who has no tranquility, there is no concentration." Bhagavad Gita

Many years ago I made a short film, 5 minutes in length. Digging through the garage last week, I uncovered the VHS tape of this film and had it scanned so that I could share it on the Internet. It wasn't long before somebody told me, "5 minutes? That's way too long. Nobody's gonna watch something that's five minutes."

Since when is 5 minutes too long?

It led to my thinking of the days when I dated a lovely women with 2 children. She'd get a babysitter for the kids, and we'd go on romantic dates to nice restaurants. I'd see her carving an expensive piece of fish into little tiny pieces; so deeply ingrained was her habit of prepping the food for her kids, even when they weren't with us.

In much the same way, information in today's world is chopped into little byte size pieces easily digestable to the modern mind. The age of You Tube, text messaging, and email mayhem is affecting the depth, width, and grasp of our attention spans. Our attention is primed to digest only small bits and pieces of life. With a jumping bean for a mind, it's harder and harder to savor life's finer moments, to explore deeper meaning, to discover greater passion. Following are 3 ways that shorter attentions spans are affecting our quality of life.

1. It's Harder to Perceive Meaning

"The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine, the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?" Kahlil Gibran

If you were to watch only one great scene from a classic movie, you might be intrigued. But without seeing the whole movie, the scene would not make sense. Such is life. There are stories that evolve over the course of an entire lifetime. When we perceive random events as standing alone with no connection to the past or future, they make no sense. We've all endured those long days where we lose touch with the meaning, and wonder what's the point of this whole thing?

But when you put certain events into the context of your entire life, you begin to sense rhyme and reason. For instance, when's the last time you pulled a dusty photo album from the shelves and looked at pictures of your life as a youth? It brings up emotions and memories, some of which are really intense. And you realize how much you've changed, grown, matured; how the lessons taught by some of those people in the pictures made no sense as a kid, but now, they make perfect sense; how memories of the hard times evoked in the pictures made the subsequent good times so much better.

Sometimes, you gotta peel your mind away from all the 2 sentence emails, 2 word text messages, and mashed up You Tube videos that scramble your attention. Lie back, put your feet up, close your eyes, and perceive your life as something much richer and more complex than a series of random and meaningless moments. "When you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot." (Arthur Schoepenhauer)


2. It's Harder to Sense the Feeling of Life

"Life is not about the meaning. It's about the feeling." Joseph Campbell

With all the stimuli streaming from our computer, TV, and cell phone, our minds go into overdrive. Technology is an evolution of the mind, not the heart. Thus, the modern human tends to be stuck in her head, sifting through her email inbox, deleting voicemails, surfing endless URL's. It has become difficult to turn down the mind and sense the underlying feeling of life. Think for a moment how wonderful it feels to lie on the beach on a warm summer day; or to ski down a powdery mountain in a winter wonderland; or to bite into your favorite comfort food on a lazy weekend afternoon. Those memories evoke a special feeling which, when accessed, embraced, and emitted to others, is very powerful.

The modern science shows that a human being reacts much more to feelings than she does to thoughts*. When you come from a place of positive feeling, you become significantly more powerful as a parent, professional, and spouse. Your co-workers want to be around and work with the one who makes them feel good. Your children are more likely to want to respect the one who makes them feel comforted. Your spouse or lover will want to be close to the one who makes them feel relaxed.

By taking time away from the high-tech gadgets, you effectively stretch open your attention and create space to sink into the heart. A wise one said, "Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor."


3. It's Harder to Achieve

"The sword will always be defeated by the spirit." Napolean

The yogis define a rarely accessed form of strength which, in the language of Sanskrit, is called "vajra." Vajra translates to mean "an invincible quality" and in Western Culture, we call it the indestructible quality of an impassioned spirit.

As the world continues to scramble our attention, our minds are no longer configured to focus on any one thing for prolonged periods of time. And it becomes more difficult to search out your passion. A human being living without passion is like an automobile living without fuel. It's hard to get anywhere. But passion is not hard to come by. It's like a match in a dry forest. One strike of the match, and everything will soon be ablaze. Using that analogy in a more positive light, all it takes is finding that little thing you love in life, and before long your brain lights up like a time machine. Anthony Robbins says, "Passion is the genesis of genius." Just a little passion can set your life on fire!

So many humans beings sputter across a lifetime, with plenty of vision, but lacking the fuel to achieve true greatness. Give yourself a chance to step away from the madness of the Information Age and ponder your dreams, stoke the imagination, turn up the radio, and stir your passion!


*Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, by Drew Westen


by David Romanelli (Yeah Dave)

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