What I write today may seem obvious but it struck me as something we should consider. When I was young the revolution was the transistor radio. You could carry around in your pocket access to various forms of music. On certain days of the week, and a specific time of the day, there was even talk radio. Of course, there was television as well. I recall when we got our first color TV. During the day, because not all stations had around-the-clock programming, you could watch one of 5 TV channels. Contrast this with today where you can watch any movie ever made on demand. There are likely a million podcasts available today and billions of YouTube videos. All of this is accessible from a device in your pocket. Kids and young adults have a different problem than what I experienced at their age.
I liked to learn new things even as a young person. I struggled with two problems. First, what did I want to learn more about? What is going to help me learn a skill or a craft? The second problem was, how I was going to learn these new skills. Where could I go to get more information about them? Today’s youth is challenged with too much information. Since they have access to almost all recorded knowledge at their fingertips, there is too much to choose from. For us to continue to improve the quality of human life we need people to narrow themselves to particular fields of study and to solving specific problems. With an endless supply of content, most of which is just mind-numbing, the challenge is to focus ourselves on accomplishing something. The ability to focus one’s mind on a problem and the discipline to remain on task for long periods will be in shorter supply. The creators of the transistor radio did not have the level of distraction we have. The amount of progress and improvement in quality we experienced in the last hundred years could fail to continue because of our inability to narrow our focus and our lack of discipline to stay on task.
We can look at our own lives and see the unproductive time we spend on our devices. Only to look up and realize things in our environment are not as we wish them to be. We could be putting our devices down and performing the things we know are necessary to have the life we desire. The nation with the highest quality of life will be the nation of people who can focus and discipline the greatest number of minds. Some might see this as a call for censorship or government control of content. There are likely nations going down that route. History teaches us that that approach creates other problems and does not produce the proposed benefits.
Throughout history, it has been the nations with the most self-disciple populous that have moved themselves forward in terms of quality of life. I believe the self-disciple is like a muscle. We all have muscles and we train them to become stronger and larger. We can train ourselves to remain on task and focus our minds. Just like starting a physical training program, we should not have high expectations from day one. Maybe we can only produce one hour of focused time. Building on that hour, we can create systems and habits that slowly expand that time while still allowing for rest and resetting ourselves. Walking outside in nature can allow our mind to wander while the physical body benefits from movement. It is my experience that mental focus enables physical training. Physical exercise allows the mind to reset and the mutually beneficial cycle can continue. Replace physical movement and focused work with mind-numbing content and the future does not look promising.
Sharkhabits.com 