IBM used to give away desk name plates with the word THINK on them. Perhaps that’s what the title of this post should have been. Pausing to think is as much of a challenge today as how one thinks.
We are becoming increasingly scatter-brained. Business and Life at the Speed of Thought leaves no time to smell the roses unless of course the scent comes packaged as aromatherapy. “Ready, fire, aim,” we’re told. “If you snooze you lose.” “Just do it!”
When was the last time you had the patience to watch, much less actually watched a show on television that wasn’t comprised of five minute segments, where the people interviewed weren’t forced to rush their answers because of “hard breaks”? As an aside, when was the last time you saw commentators who actually presented meaningful analysis or had something truly substantive to say? (Answer: the only contemporary show I can think of is “Life, Liberty and Levin”.
FOMO. The Fear of Missing Out. It’s not just a millennial thing. I see countless supposed adults with their noses pinned to small screens studying the latest (within the last 2 minutes) pop-culture meme. Too many of us to block out the real world and live in a virtual one. FOMO causes shallow thinking. No thinking, really…just reaction to often heart-string-tugging snippets or easy-to-remember, catchy slogans and phrases.
Since information, whether true or false, right or wrong, good or bad is always at our fingertips through Google! (it’s a verb now), why bother to memorize, remember or LEARN anything? Fewer and fewer people actually concentrate on a single subject or topic. And thus, increasingly, we have an entire generation who are a mile wide and an inch deep. And fewer and fewer people actually think. Most just respond to stimuli.
What happened to “Less haste, less waste?” What happened to Critical Thinking?
Laziness. What the internet and exponentially growing databases of “stuff” has done is condition people to obtain information from sound bites, with no real depth, no substantive corroboration, no skepticism. If it sounds good, or “feels” right, it’s accepted.
Talk about mind control! The demagogues of the Third Reich would have loved this medium. An ability to influence/brainwash an entire population of dumbed-down, lazy people would have meant we might all be speaking German today! Oh, and by the way, the Russians and Chinese and the LEFT have figured this out and are doing precisely what the Third Reich would have done…broadcasting propaganda with an efficiency and effectiveness that only “The Matrix” could improve on.
Think. Think! When so much garbage is constantly overloading our input circuits, at an ever-increasing rate, we have to force ourselves to stop and think. And it’s not just stopping to think. It’s compartmentalizing so as to shut out the noise. It’s not just turning off the ring tone. It’s turning off the vibration notification as well. It’s finding a quiet spot and moment amid the chaos to consider what’s important, what really needs to be done, not what the voice in your ear or the face on the screen are telling you to do.
And it’s being skeptical, increasingly. We used to say, “Don’t believe everything you read.” That became, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” Whether you liked him or not, everyone expected and relied on Walter Cronkite to give us Real News. Can you say the same of the 6PM news anchors today? Sure, the Bon Ami folks tried to convince you that their product would’t scratch your porcelain surfaces. But we all recognized that as advertising. Now, “infomercials” abound, and ALL the news is biased, colored, i.e. ‘fake’ in the sense that it never just reports what’s happening. We need to listen to or watch EVERYTHING with a major, not just healthy, dose of skepticism.
It’s sad that we can’t count on anyone or any organization to provide honest information anymore. But that’s the current reality. The only antidote is Critical Thinking – forcing ourselves to sort the wheat from the chaff, to make decisions and form opinions based not on what the firehose of noise directs at us, but on what reasoned judgment emerges from pause and reflection.
In short, don’t just think.
Ponder.
