I know that I'm guilty of this - just voluntarily putting my phone in the other room causes withdrawal-like anxiety, followed by a greater sense of awareness.
Maybe future generations will see our management of information devices as backwards and unhealthy once we learn more about the human brain, the same way we treat smoking, child-rearing, and daily routines of yesterday as horrifyingly detrimental.
Personally I think it will be the reverse. Future generations will have wetware installed that will augment their brains and memories. Rather than learning memorization skills, they will instead be trained on searching and analyzing the data they can pipe into their brains from outside sources.
I think some of that will come with training for how to avoid brain rot, but when the world's data is at your fingertips, it seems like it might be better to focus the brain on processing vs. memorization. What I'll be curious to see is how we adapt to being always connected like that. Will we see the first true hive minds evolve? Will we lose our sense of self? Will time seemingly speed up?
In the near future we're going to see even more "information diets", "digital cleanses", meditative go-to-nature sort of breaks integrated into lifestyle routines.
My wife and I recently spent a few nights at an Airbnb in the mountains where we couldn't get cell reception and the wifi had a crappy satellite Internet connection we'd been asked to avoid using as much as possible. Also none of our digital crap was there, just a few physical books we brought and some card games the hosts provided.
It felt great. It's had me thinking more and more or the digital things and the hyper-available entertainment and information (and, maybe importantly, hyper-available choice of which to indulge in, at a moment's notice) as kind of junk-food like.
Yeah it's cool to be able to watch all this crap from my childhood, and a thousand great tv shows or movies, or hundreds of the best video games yet made, or browse endlessly for new music tailored to my tastes, or whatever, totally on demand—but maybe that kind of thing's just not healthy to have around.
> Yeah it's cool to be able to watch all this crap from my childhood, and a thousand great tv shows or movies, or hundreds of the best video games yet made, or browse endlessly for new music tailored to my tastes, or whatever, totally on demand—but maybe that kind of thing's just not healthy to have around.
I feel the same, although I have a hard time articulating it well. I think I'm slightly better at not watching hour after hour of utter garbage than I used to be, though.
When I realize my phone has been out of reach for more than a few minutes my stomach drops because of the chance I've missed some catastrophic work alert that means our company's servers are all down... I probably need a new job.
If you work in IT use something like PagerDuty or OpsGenie and set it to harass you until you acknowledge. Then you don't need to worry about missing something.
Automate all the things.
Seriously only way to manage complex systems with small teams and stay sane. Prioritize automation and monitoring. When you do get emergencies spend the time when you are back in the office to figure out how to improve your processes to prevent that particular problem in the future.
I mean my texts are set to annoy me till I acknowledge them, but if I'm watching TV, in the gym, outside doing some sort of non-tech shenanigans, and I just don't have my phone with me, no amount of alerts will help at that point.
Those are usually the "missed a stair" feelings when I realize I've been without my phone for too long.
future generations will have to deal with lack of drinking water, food, lack of energy and climate change, maybe they won't have time to deal with submitting to servitude to a handful a gigantic transnational corporations trying to track every move and massive surveillance.
Maybe future generations will see our management of information devices as backwards and unhealthy once we learn more about the human brain, the same way we treat smoking, child-rearing, and daily routines of yesterday as horrifyingly detrimental.