“I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open. Too much clutter on the desktop. There is a metaphorical spinning rainbow wheel inside me. Disabling me. And if only I could find a way to switch off some of the frames, if only I could drag some of the clutter into the trash, then I would be fine. But which frame would I choose, when they all seem so essential? How can I stop my mind being overloaded when the world is overloaded? We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet
It's that time of the year (middle of winter in the northern hemisphere) when I start to hear lots and lots of people complaining about winter. They say: “It's too long, it's too cold, it's too much snow, it's horrible.”
So here's a message to leave those negative feelings behind:
“If you choose not to enjoy snow, you will have less joy in your life, but the same amount of snow.”
The other day I was watching this TED talk on “Mindfulness, Technology and Attention Activism” by Jay Vidyarthi and he mentions this quote from Herbert A. Simon back in the 60'/70's.
Simon, a Nobel prize winner, was onto something here and I wonder what he would say about the world today... 🤔
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
—Simon, H. A. (1971) “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.
