Short, well-written essay. Read it, then turn off your computer and sit outside for a while. Not to be smug, but I walked to the park, sat in the backyard, and will play volleyball for 2 hours under a gorgeous New Mexico sky in sight of a mountain range. A good day. mjh
Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty? – NYTimes.com
As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems as if we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with alluring distractors, cyberbullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information.
But, at exactly the same time, we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.
Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty? – NYTimes.com
[hat tip to Meg Adams and Merri Rudd]