Overcoming our comfort zones

In the late '60's the Information Age which continues to explode today had already begun, and Alvin Toeffler wrote Future Shock prognosticating what might happen to us as we became increasingly drenched and bombarded with information of all kinds from all media: our beliefs would be fragmented and fractured, our puny human brains couldn't handle it all, we wouldn't be able to recognize what to embrace from what to reject, to separate the important from the unimportant. We would generally be overwhelmed and shocked by the future we created.

Nearly a half-century has elapsed since that vision, and it seems to me Toeffler was right. We can't handle all the information we are exposed to each day--at least not in the way we used to. Our emails alone number in the hundreds for many, and we've all learned to speedread and scan most of our reading, toss out the spam and the mailbox crammed with ads and junk mail, speedflip through the hundreds of channels the tv tries to wedge into our heads, and so forth. Our mode of discriminating what to keep from what to toss, what to focus on from what to ignore, has become faster and faster, and less and less considered, mulled over, than ever before. We realize we still ought to think critically, but every pressure is instead to think automatically and efficiently in our high-speed sort of the information flood. We are riding the crest of the information tidal wave on a very short board, and trying to keep our balance however we may.

So how do we cope with the dilemma of too much information and too little time to consider it critically, assuming none of us wants to fall prey to the ostrich response and simply ignore the problem? The answer varies, often by generation and circumstance. The tendency of many seniors like me may be to turn to the past for our familiar ideas and cling tenaciously to our outmoded but comfortable ways. Our comfort zones become our Capuccin monastaries, our protected enclaves of the spirit, where the confusing, fast-paced world outside our needs won't bother our tranquility. The cost, of course, is that we sacrifice living in it, growing, and experiencing more than we had.

Surprisingly, the tendency of young adults is somewhat similar in insulating the psyche from the perils to the mind and spirit which the information flood threatens. I've noticed as a college teacher, that students are blissfully unaware of most current events, prefer not to worry about the world very much, to not make commitments which are far-reaching and to instead be very flexible to change, to not hold onto much of anything very long if it becomes inconvenient. They will sign up for yearbook or newspaper staffs, dramatic productions and other activities, then think nothing of simply not showing up before the first edition. I've seen cast quit at the dress rehearsal--just not interested anymore. This establishes a comfort zone that protects itself against consequences by evading the need to accept responsibility.

The entertainments of the young are typically to accept the sensational and spectacular and loud over anything of substance or subtlety or depth, to settle for the Wikipedia summary of an idea, to avoid complexity or extended study of almost anything, and to ride that wave forward in such a way that leaves all problems and troublesome issues behind, including conscience, mistakes, morality, social responsibility--troublesome issues all that are best left unconsidered.

I asked a colleague, reading the morning paper in our coffee lounge, if he read the paper and followed current events when he was in college. No, not at all, he answered. Did I? No, I realized, I didn't care about the world beyond my family and the campus till much later--except for the big headline events like President Kennedy's assassination that had everyone shouting on the streets. But not issues. Not trends. Not opinions or ideas. If it wasn't required in a course and I didn't have to be tested on it or write a paper about it, I didn't want to know it. My head was being rewired by my professors and friends enough, then.

So when, I wondered, do we begin to care about what's happening in the world at large, if not by college? Perhaps it changes when we get out on our own, into our jobs and careers, and begin to navigate our own lives. For the first time, probably, what to do next isn't always clear, and we realize we have to make decisions that will have consequences for quite a while, and we gradually realize that what's been happening "out there" in the big, scary world has importance for us to know in order to make those decisions intelligently and from an informed perspective.

From then on, we are forced to expand our comfort zones. Reality demands it. And we begin to voluntarily change some of the ideas we used to cling to for the sake of seeing things as clearly as we can. Today's vast communications explosion has made ignoring inconvenient new truths and living in a bubble of comfortable ideas much more difficult than before the information age began, but the fact of it has created an imperative, I think, to accept that things are not so fixed and knowable in many cases, that life is change and flux, that there is seldom certainties that we should try to cling to at all costs for the sake of validating our preferred beliefs, if new evidence suggests we should adapt and change. If we accept that imperative, perhaps, accept change and do not fear its challenge, we will probably be more comfortable in the long run.