Overload? Definitely.
That’s what happens when we get too much information. Too much in, and too little time to process it. Oh, we pride ourselves on being able to handle it – it’s the modern era, and we’re the modern species. But it gets to us. The incessant noise of the urban landscape. The constant assault.
If any of the information were positive it wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s not. It’s a barrage of negativism and sensationalism that’s completely detrimental to our health. Murders, storms, scandals, abuses, illnesses – worry upon worry upon worry foisted on our only-human shoulders. It’s repetition and regurgitation of bad news, of evil acts, of personal despair made public. It’s loss and judgment – the loss of the fundamental Christian forgiveness – forever ceded to public recrimination, justified or not.
Sometimes it’s just too much. If Gertrude Stein was pondering information overload in the dirty-thirties, one can only imagine what she’d have to say about the modern era – where people can hardly ever shut out the darkness, the demands and unreasonable fierceness of others. Thanks to technology, things are so much better now – but they’re also so much worse.
Eventually, this constant bombardment will cause our view of our world to become skewed. It will look, to us, to be either worse than it truly is, or in our gullibility, better. It is chimeric – it smiles innocuously, even as it plans how it will kill us.
Remember to take time to recover. In order to live in the world, we must sometimes detach from it.
Thanks for visiting.