Fear & Loathing with ADD

Fear & Loathing with ADD

Single-tasking in this era of the multi-task, I type into a single text file, without a Web browser in the background or the television on. It’s more complicated without the distractions so I at least have to have Bob Dylan’s latest at a reasonable volume so an accordion can provide a backbeat to riff upon.
I understand there are now adults with attention-deficient disorder, one of the scores of newly-coined diseases psychological professionals want to hang on us humans.
I don’t doubt this one and wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes an epidemic. The problem isn’t us humans, it’s the oodles of information that are a mouse-click away. It’s the smart phones we carry and the Ipods and the digital cable or satellite television with hundreds of channels and still nothing of substance on.
It’s e-books and right wing radio and pod casts and social networks that keep us connected at all costs.
There’s so much to pay attention to that it’s impossible to offer undivided attention anymore, so as I’ve said, it’s no wonder there’s a syndrome among both children and adults of attention deficits.
It’s so great a problem that I’d be surprised if there was a single soul who was reading this with rapt attention: Lord knows I’m not writing it that way.
Our collective attention deficit is something that should spur more worries than the national debt, but aside from a few excited drug company execs and a couple mental health professionals, the problem barely rates a blip on the international radar; eventually it may be the subject of an impassioned PSA, but that’s about it.
In generations to come, it’s going to be more worrisome than another swine flu pandemic because it is a serious, if not lethal problem.
Kids are growing up without being able to get from here to there without a GPS. They don’t know the names of local rivers or physical landmarks and they read and write in a babble of abbreviations and slang that’s yet to be organized into a dictionary.
Ear buds deliver audio instructions, Google organizes the information and if specific knowledge is needed there’s the Wikipedia fact collective to tap into.
There’s no need to remember when i comes before e because the computer programs self-correct and there are more important things to remember like random passwords and keeping track of who posted what in the continuous news feed.
It’s beyond mind-boggling and in fact is an infinite swirling abyss of information spinning out of control.
Achtung ad infinitum, and ever changing like strobe light flashes by the nanosecond.
I don’t know what the cure is aside from repeated sensory deprivation chamber treatments and/or seclusion, but the withdrawal pains from such have yet to be studied and could probably be fatal, possibly resulting in creation of a class of zombies who are in fact living dead, perhaps moaning, perhaps chanting incantations in binary code.
It’s scary stuff: First it was not enough information, then it ballooned into too much information and now that information’s being spewed for information’s sake it’s impossible not to pay attention to it all with a dizzying intensity that crashes and burns into silence and a flatline buzz of white noise that signals it's time to re-boot, defragment and quarantine the misinformation.