Can you be dead without realizing it?

The world has become impatient.

It’s easier than ever to be pulled out of the moment—advertisements, cellphones, notifications. It seems like the world is created to chip away our attention.

And it’s working.

We’ve all gotten used to this era of checking your email while waiting in line at the grocery store. The pop-up reminder for our next meeting covering the screen before the current meeting is even over no longer surprises us. It probably doesn’t even annoy us anymore.

In fact, we might enjoy it.

This ever-growing need to fill our moments with more—no matter what that more may be—seems like an addiction. One that is constantly enabled by everything surrounding us.

In a talk by Richard Jolly, he coined this “hurry-sickness.”

See how many of these apply to you:

• When you microwave something for 30 seconds, you feel the need to do something while you wait
• You catch a buzz from just barely making a bus, train, or flight
• You find waiting in a line, for anything, incredibly irritating
• Finding yourself wanting to interrupt people frequently or wishing that they’d get their ideas across faster
• Multi-tasking during work calls
• Browsing your phone while streaming content on another device
• Pressing an elevator’s close door button or a street crossing button several times

Shockingly, that video was recorded 5 years ago. I wonder what Richard Jolly would have to say in the age of TikTok.

In that talk, Jolly was speaking in the context of business development. He argues that this hurry-sickness is destroying our ability to stop and think, and with this, killing our ability to create value.

But it applies just as well to our personal lives.

Without stopping to think, how can we hope to be present in the moment? How can we hope for our decisions to be intentional?

To experience the present requires a moment of quiet contemplation. Filling our attention so thoroughly might please our brains, but it kills our spirit.

2021-11-14