The funny thing is that there are two brands: Wet and Forget (which is slow) and “30 seconds” which seems like the complete opposite. And the irony is that for actually removing the lichen, Wet and Forget probably does a more thorough job. Thirty Seconds works on the surface. Which is exactly what imposed distraction does — it moves fast, it looks like it’s doing something, but nothing actually goes deep.
Processing time is very limited and yet important.
It’s a strategic move rather than something that is imposed on you, so you can almost say that you are strategically distracting yourself. The second part of it is that, once you have distracted yourself, you also need the processing time. There is an ad in New Zealand for a spray that you use on different surfaces, like on the gravel, where it says “just spray and walk away”, and then the fungus, I think, gets removed, or the lichen is removed. I think that talks about the processing time. I’m not sure how the processing time and the chosen versus imposed distraction correspond with each other.
One of the things that kind of frustrates me is the processing time. I was telling Renuka today about how time is getting compressed because we don’t have time to process something. I will go to Spotify, and I’m looking to play some music that I’ve already decided on, but Spotify will bring up something that it feels is new for me, and momentarily I am distracted, but it’s almost like that metaphorical annoying cat that jumps on your keyboard. When you like cats, this is frustrating, but if you don’t like them, it is even more so. I really don’t like being given a recommendation out of the blue.
When I was younger, I used to go to the music store to be distracted. I wanted to find new music, but that was only every few months, whereas now the distraction is continuous. When you look at an Apple podcast, not only will you get new podcasts all the time, but now they’ve added another factor of video podcasts. Yes, I know there are options, and you have to go to some other place and download another app, which strips all the information out and only keeps what you want, but life has become more complicated in the sense that it is forcing you to make non-mainstream decisions before going to the record store with a mainstream decision. You did it when you were free, when you were ready for that moment. Now it’s all one of continuous interruption.
The big downside of this interruption is the processing time. Everything has to be processed at an enormous amount of speed. There is no gap between a concept and the time it takes to process it. My friend Adam explained this really well to me at one point. He said that he would stay over after the workshop and not go back home, which is completely different from the behaviour of many of us. If the workshop ends at 3:00, we’ll be trying to get back on the 6:00 flight, but then we don’t have processing time. Adam would stay overnight and then spend the next day just wandering about, looking at what he had learned and then putting down the steps that he would take.
This is the kind of processing time that has been grated off our skins. Well, that’s a rough phrase to use, but it’s something like that. It is something that we had for a long time, and now we don’t, and yet time is and has always been a problem. “What is this world so full of care? We have no time to stand and stare.” Wasn’t written now. It was written centuries ago. Maybe the absence of time has always been a problem, or is it just a modern problem? It’s hard to say.
The funny thing is that there are two brands: Wet and Forget (which is slow) and “30 seconds” which seems like the complete opposite. And the irony is that for actually removing the lichen, Wet and Forget probably does a more thorough job. Thirty Seconds works on the surface. Which is exactly what imposed distraction does — it moves fast, it looks like it’s doing something, but nothing actually goes deep.
Processing time is very limited and yet important.
It’s a strategic move rather than something that is imposed on you, so you can almost say that you are strategically distracting yourself. The second part of it is that, once you have distracted yourself, you also need the processing time. There is an ad in New Zealand for a spray that you use on different surfaces, like on the gravel, where it says “just spray and walk away”, and then the fungus, I think, gets removed, or the lichen is removed. I think that talks about the processing time. I’m not sure how the processing time and the chosen versus imposed distraction correspond with each other.
One of the things that kind of frustrates me is the processing time. I was telling Renuka today about how time is getting compressed because we don’t have time to process something. I will go to Spotify, and I’m looking to play some music that I’ve already decided on, but Spotify will bring up something that it feels is new for me, and momentarily I am distracted, but it’s almost like that metaphorical annoying cat that jumps on your keyboard. When you like cats, this is frustrating, but if you don’t like them, it is even more so. I really don’t like being given a recommendation out of the blue.
When I was younger, I used to go to the music store to be distracted. I wanted to find new music, but that was only every few months, whereas now the distraction is continuous. When you look at an Apple podcast, not only will you get new podcasts all the time, but now they’ve added another factor of video podcasts. Yes, I know there are options, and you have to go to some other place and download another app, which strips all the information out and only keeps what you want, but life has become more complicated in the sense that it is forcing you to make non-mainstream decisions before going to the record store with a mainstream decision. You did it when you were free, when you were ready for that moment. Now it’s all one of continuous interruption.
The big downside of this interruption is the processing time. Everything has to be processed at an enormous amount of speed. There is no gap between a concept and the time it takes to process it. My friend Adam explained this really well to me at one point. He said that he would stay over after the workshop and not go back home, which is completely different from the behaviour of many of us. If the workshop ends at 3:00, we’ll be trying to get back on the 6:00 flight, but then we don’t have processing time. Adam would stay overnight and then spend the next day just wandering about, looking at what he had learned and then putting down the steps that he would take.
This is the kind of processing time that has been grated off our skins. Well, that’s a rough phrase to use, but it’s something like that. It is something that we had for a long time, and now we don’t, and yet time is and has always been a problem. “What is this world so full of care? We have no time to stand and stare.” Wasn’t written now. It was written centuries ago. Maybe the absence of time has always been a problem, or is it just a modern problem? It’s hard to say.