Juxtaposition of the day. Saw this piece in The New York Times about why there are no Big Ideas anymore:
We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.
And that's just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.
[. . .]
We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn't have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don't want to.
[. . .]
We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today's big questions.
And then this piece in Los Angeles Times caught my eye, about the value of doing nothing:
When people are asked where they get their best ideas, they answer, "In the shower." "On vacation." "Doing nothing." They begin, in other words, by simply being.
This despite the fact that such dreamy purposelessness is too often treated with contempt, perhaps especially here in the United States. We "work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don't get enough sleep and feel harried too much of the time," says sociologist Judith Schor. At least a third of us report that we have no time to reflect on what we're doing, that we always feel rushed. "I'm so busy," we tell one another when we meet on the fly, half-proud, half-overwhelmed. "Really, I'm crazy-busy."
That it might be possible to arrange one's life so as to be slightly less frantic has somehow become unimaginable. And yet there is a great deal to be gained from doing nothing. We need space to brood and ruminate and mull. We need to slow down to get where we're going.
Too much information that we're not inclined to use as the bulding blocks of thought, and too much time spent avoiding being alone to think. Might be related, don't you think?
