Everything is information.
Through most of human history, success and survival depended mainly on physical factors – strength, land, means of production. Today, success is mostly about information – how to get it and how to process, manage, integrate and use it.
In the past, information played a supporting role to the physical activities of finding food and avoiding predators. Today, managing information is the primary activity in much of our work and personal lives.
In the past information helped us navigate the landscape; today information is the very landscape we have to navigate.
And just as in the past there was food to be found and predators to fear in the dark corners of the landscape, so are today opportunities and dangers hiding in the convolutions of our daily information landscape.
– At work we have emails, phone calls, paperwork and meetings. We can’t afford to drop the ball on anything, can’t afford to miss a deadline or deliverable at any stage of the game.
– At home we have to stay on top of children’s school, exams, activities and programs. We have health, diet, nutrition, planning for the future, college and retirement to worry about.
– And then there are all the other things we’d like to get to: remodeling the kitchen, planning that vacation, self improvement – adopting the advice from the all those books and articles that we read: 5 traits of successful entrepreneurs, or 7 traits of happy people, etc.
We can feel the weight of information tugging at us every day:
– various deadlines to chase down every day,
– bits of information needed to get something – anything – done,
– self-improvements never gotten around to,
– projects left unfinished, or forgotten altogether.
Information is potential, and it flows at staggering rates, beyond our natural ability to cope with it.
Deep in our bones we can feel life passing us by somehow; we can hear the siren call to get onboard the train, before it leaves the station. Yet, so accustomed are we to the constant churn of anxiety that we don’t know how to heed its call.
It turns out that we can do something about it.
But first, we have to reconnect with anxiety,
our very old friend indeed.
