Never-ending Flux

Here’s what wears me out: the never-ending flux of noisy information that comes at me daily, the emails and WhatsApps and texts, the photos and memes and comments on comments, the video clips and funnies and tragic headline newsfeeds, the reminders and requests and popups, the angst and rage and bickering of the echo chamber, the group chats you mean to leave but don’t have the time to, the group chants you mean to respond to but don’t have the time to. The information bombardment is too much, it’s a data blitzkrieg, an accumulation of communication noise that leads to madness, renders me crazily brain dead and rocking in my chair, emitting a self-soothing hum, struck dumb, stupid and ineffective, sucked clean of inspiration, creatively arid, incapacitated, my attention span so sliced and diced that I can attend to nothing effectively. I apply tiny cubes of concentration, chuck ill-thought-out responses to every anthill that demands I look at it. And they are not all anthills, but the problem is, so much information comes at me that I become less good at discerning the mountain from the molehill from the anthill. The supercharged highway of labour-saving e-exchange and millisecond transmission has become the opposite of what it was supposed to be, the communicative effect is lost as every new message wipes out the one that has come before, renders you a little less powerless. I think it deadens my judgement and discrimination, it is turning me into someone who looks at message with a sinking heart, placing them on a trajectory somewhere along the line from antipathy to umbrage. Go away, I don’t want to deal with you. Yet, many of them are important, interesting, kind, thoughtful, and I do have to deal with them, but weeding out what matters from doesn’t has become more difficult. I’m worn out by it all. Mark this though, if it all went quiet, I wouldn’t like that, no I wouldn’t like that.

Louis MacNeice knows how to hold one’s worn-out world-weariness alongside the small joys of the everyday, he knows how to place the antithetical in the same frame, grasp contradictory emotions in each fist and maintain one’s balance. I know this because he tells us the last fourteen lines of his poem, Plurality, and whilst I have just ranted about soul-scarifying effects of information overload, I would miss it if it were gone.

Note to self: be despondent, be exhausted, be frustrated with your lot, be exasperated with the daftness of the world, but don’t lose sight of the sunlight that, perhaps inconsistently, yet persistently, cuts through it all.

Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled
By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,
Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,
Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux
And so he must continue, raiding the abyss
With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,
Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick
Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,
Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,
Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,
But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

Plurality, Louis MacNeice (extract, last 14 lines)