What leading executives need more than anything today is
wisdom. And one of the things that makes it harder and harder to
connect with our wisdom is our increasing dependence on technology. Our
hyper-connectedness is the snake lurking in our digital Garden of Eden.
“People
have a pathological relationship with their devices,” said Kelly
McGonigal, a psychologist who studies the science of self-control at
Stanford’s School of Medicine. “People feel not just addicted, but
trapped.” We are finding it harder and harder to unplug and renew
ourselves.
Professor Mark Williams summed up the
damage we’re doing to ourselves: “What we know from the neuroscience —
from looking at the brain scans of people that are always rushing
around, who never taste their food, who are always going from one task
to another without actually realising what they’re doing — is that the
emotional part of the brain that drives people is on high alert all the
time.
Mindfulness
“So, when
people think: ‘I’m rushing around to get things done,’ it’s almost
like, biologically, they’re rushing around just as if they were escaping
from a predator. That’s the part of the brain that’s active. But nobody
can run fast enough to escape their own worries.” Mindfulness, on the
other hand, “cultivates our ability to do things knowing that we’re
doing them”. In other words, we become aware that we’re aware. It’s an
incredibly important tool — and one that we can’t farm out to
technology.
There are some who believe the increasing
power of big data (using powerful computers to sift through and find
patterns in massive amounts of information) is going to rival the human
consciousness at some point. But there’s also growing scepticism about
how effective big data is at solving problems.
As Nassim Taleb, author of
The Black Swan
, writes: “Big data may mean more information, but it also means more
false information.” And even when the information is not false, the
problem is “that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack”.
Empty information
The
quest for knowledge may be pursued at higher speeds with smarter tools
today, but wisdom is found no more readily than it was three thousand
years ago in the court of King Solomon. In fact, ours is a generation
bloated with information and starved for wisdom.
Stand-up
Louis CK has put a brilliant comedic mirror in front of us and our
screen addictions. In one of his routines, he captures the absurdity of
children’s events where none of the parents is actually able to watch
the soccer game or school play because they’re straining to record it on
video with their devices, blocking “their vision of their actual
child”. So hell-bent are we on recording our children’s milestones that
we miss them altogether. “The resolution on the kid is unbelievable if
you just look,” he joked. “It’s totally HD.”
File it
under: Be careful what you wish for. Big data, unfettered information,
the ability to be in constant contact, and our growing reliance on
technology are all conspiring to create a noisy traffic jam between us
and our place of insight and peace. Call it an iParadox; our smartphones
are actually blocking our path to wisdom. —
© Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
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