We have at our finger tips access to a new world of information, but more than this - we are involuntarily bombarded with information as new channels of information emerge. The internet, broadband, mobile phones, texts, advertising all come gushing information at us and the axiom of being told is that we should listen. Do you know anyone who will watch the ‘least bad’ programme on television rather than turn it off? Who gets hooked on soaps? It is human nature to gather information – we are hard wired to do it – but when this capacity to retrieve information is satisfied by showbiz gossip or details of the lives of ‘celebrities’ we just don’t know when to stop, like kids in a sweet shop.
We are running 21st century way-of-life ‘software’ on way-we-are ‘hardware’ that hasn’t evolved in thousands of years – the human instinct to seek knowledge is now perverted by receiving a plethora of useless half truths from a myriad of sources. As our information environment has grown exponentially, what has happened to our ability to influence the worlds around us? Of course there has been no shift at all in the way-we-are; we live at the same pace, for roughly the same period of time and so can achieve pretty much the same in our lives as our parents and theirs before them.
This disparity between our growing sphere of interest and our stable sphere of influence creates a powerful illusion; we seem to live ever more hectic lives, but we feel increasingly impotent, somehow smaller, somehow isolated. This illusion of hectic lives encourages us to seek ways of relaxing so we watch more TV, eat ready meals, and enjoy more leisure than at any time in history - so we achieve less than our full potential.
We feel smaller and smaller, am I invisible?
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