Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (15 page)

Nearer to the full moon, an uptick in serotonin increases self-awareness, generating both high focus and high energy. Serotonin, the chemical that gets boosted by drugs like Prozac, is thought to communicate the abundance or dearth of food resources to our brain. “When under its influence we can feel euphoric, spontaneous, and yet composed and sedate. Whereas acetylcholine worked to anchor us to our physical world, serotonin buoys us to the mental realm, allowing us to experience the physical world from an embodied, more lucid vantage point. We actually benefit from solitude at this time, as when an artist finds his muse.”

Over the next week, we can enjoy the benefits of increased dopamine. This chemical—responsible for the rush one gets on heroin or after performing a death-defying stunt—is responsible for reward-driven learning. “It allows us to expand our behaviors outside of our routines, decrease our intensity, and essentially blend with the energy of the moment. If acetylcholine is the ultimate memory neurotransmitter, dopamine is the ultimate experiential one. Functionally, it serves us best when we’re doing social activities we enjoy.” In other words, it’s party week.

Finally, in the last moon phase, we are dominated by norepinephrine, an arousal chemical that regulates processes like the fight-or-flight response, anxiety, and other instinctual behaviors. “We tend to be better off doing more structural tasks that don’t involve a lot of reflection. Its binary nature lets us make decisions, act on them, and then recalibrate like a GPS with a hunting rifle. The key with norepinephrine is that if it’s governed well, we experience a fluid coordination of thought and action so much so that we almost fail to feel. Everything becomes second nature.” So instead of letting the natural rise of fight-or-flight impulses turn us into anxious paranoids, we can exploit the state of nonemotional, almost reptilian arousal it encourages.

Further, within each day are four segments that correspond to each of these moon phases. In the new moon phase, people will be most effective during the early morning hours, while in the second phase leading up to the full moon, people do best in the afternoon.

Admittedly, this is all a tough pill for many of us to swallow, but after my interviews with Filippi, I began working in this fashion on this book. I would use the first week of the moon to organize chapters, do interviews, and talk with friends and colleagues about the ideas I was working on. In the second, more intense week, I would lock myself in my office, set to task, and get the most writing done. In the third week, I would edit what I had written, read new material, jump ahead to whatever section I felt like working on, and try out new ideas. And in the final week, I would revisit structure, comb through difficult passages, and recode the nightmare that is my website. My own experience is that my productivity went up by maybe 40 percent, and my peace of mind about the whole process of writing was utterly transformed for the better. Though certainly anecdotal as far as anyone else is concerned, the exercise convinced me to stay aware of these cycles from now on.

Digital technology can be brought back into the equation as well, promoting altogether new levels of sync. Think of it the way biofeedback works: a person is hooked up to a bunch of equipment that monitors his heart, breath, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and so on. That information is then fed back to him as an image on a monitor; a moving line; a pulsing light, music, or sound; or an animation. The person who wants to slow his heart rate or lower his blood pressure might do so by attempting to change a red light to a blue one. The sensors are listening and the computer is processing, but the data they feed back is the articulation of inner, cyclic activity, not its repression. Seeing this previously hidden information gives us new access to natural rhythms and the ability to either adjust them or adjust ourselves and our lives to their warning signals.

More advanced deployments of these technologies attempt to synchronize those internal rhythms with those of the outside world. Most of us today live in cities and spend most of our time indoors, where the cues that used to alert us to the changing days, moon phases, and seasons are largely hidden from us. Our minds may know it’s nighttime, but our eyes and thyroids don’t. Neither do most of us know what phase the moon is in, whether the tides are high, or if the honey is ready—even though some of our immune systems may have registered that ragweed is in the air and triggered an allergic response. So, some of our senses are still connected to the cycles to which we have coordinated our organ systems for the past several hundred thousand years, while others are blinded by our artificial environments or our efforts to synchronize to the wrong signals. (What does it mean to your body when a ten-ton bus zooms past? That you’re in the middle of an elephant stampede?)

In an effort to resynchronize our internal rhythms with those of nature, chronobiologists have developed computer programs that both monitor the various pulses of our organs while comparing and contrasting them with daily, lunar, and seasonal cycles. Not everyone marches to exactly the same beat, which is why these approaches are highly personalized. New, controversial, but effective exercise programs from companies with names like iHeart and LifeWaves exploit these emerging findings,
³⁰
assigning workouts during different, specific hours of the day over the course of each month.

Believe what we may about such strategies, there is now substantial evidence that time is not generic, however interchangeable our digital devices may make it seem. Yes, the DVR means we can record our programs instead of watching them as they are broadcast, but this does not mean the experience of watching our favorite HBO drama is the same on a Wednesday afternoon as it would have been on the Sunday evening before when everyone else was watching it. We needn’t be slaves to the network’s schedule, but neither must we submit to the notion that we are equally disposed to all activities in all time slots.

By the same token, businesses need not submit to the schedules and sequences that are external to the social and cultural rhythms defining their product cycles. Duncan Yo-Yos, for just one example, enjoy a cyclical popularity as up and down as the motion of the toy itself. The products become wildly popular every ten years or so, and then retreat into near total stagnation. The company has learned to ride this ebb and flow, emerging with TV campaigns, celebrity spokespeople, and national tournaments every time a new generation of yo-yo aficionados comes of age.

Likewise, Birkenstock shoes rise and fall in popularity along with a host of other back-to-nature products and behaviors. Instead of resisting these trend waves and ending up with unsold stock and disappointing estimates, the company has learned to recognize the signs of an impending swing in either direction. With each new wave of popularity, Birkenstock launches new lines and opens new dealerships, then pulls back when consumer appetites level off. With this strategy, the company has expanded from making just a handful of shoes to its current offering of close to five hundred different styles.

A friend of mine who worked on smart phone applications at Apple told me that Steve Jobs always thought of product development in terms of three-year cycles. Jobs simply was not interested in what was happening in the present; he only cared about the way people would be working with technology three years in the future. This is what empowered Jobs to ship the first iMacs with no slot for floppy drives, and iPhones without the ability to play the then-ubiquitous Flash movie files. He was developing products in the present that were situated to catch (and, some may argue, create) changing consumer trends instead of simply meeting his marketing department’s snapshots of current consumer demand.

This is not as easy for companies with shareholders who refuse to look at anything but quarterly reports and expect year-over-year earnings to do nothing but increase. But that is not the way either people or organizations function—especially not when they are using social networking technologies that in many ways promote the coherence of their living cultures. For while digital technology can serve to disconnect us from the cycles that have traditionally orchestrated our activities, they can also serve to bring us back into sync.

The choice of how to use them remains ours.

THE SPACE BETWEEN THE TICKS

I grew up back when family vacations meant long road trips. My brother and I would fight for control of the AAA TripTik, a plastic-bound pad of little one-page maps with a hand-drawn green-felt-tip pen line over the highway we were supposed to follow. Holding the map meant getting to look at the tiny numbers indicating the mileage between each exit, and then trying to add up how far it was to the next destination or rest stop, while out the window the trees and road signs flew by.

“I’m getting carsick,” the map holder would inevitably call out, handing over navigational authority to his sibling.

“Look out the window,” our dad would say. “At things far away. And stop looking at that map!”

What our father, an accountant, understood from experience if not brain science was that it’s hard to focus on something up close while moving at sixty-five miles per hour down a highway. This is due to what neurologists call sensory conflict. In order to locate our own positions in space, we use multiple sources of information: sight, touch, the angles of our joints, the orientation of the inner ear, and more. When we are focused on a fine motor task or tiny detail, the scale on which this occurs just doesn’t jibe with the speed at which things are flying past in our peripheral vision, or the bumps and acceleration we feel in our stomachs as the car lurches forward. Are we sitting on a couch, falling out of a tree, or running through a field? The body doesn’t know from automobiles. Our inner ear says we are moving, while our eyes, staring at a fixed object like a book, tell the brain we are stationary.

We are similarly disoriented by digital time, for it tends to mix and match different scales simultaneously. A date twenty years in the future has the same size box in the Google calendar as the one tomorrow or next week. A search result may contain both the most recent Tweet about a subject as well as an authoritative text representing fifty years of scholarship—both in the same list, in the same size, and virtually indistinguishable. Just like the world whizzing by out the car window, the digital world on the other side of our computer screens tends to move out of sync with the one in which our bodies reside.

In both cases, the driver is the only one truly safe from nausea. For while the passengers—or in the digital realm, users—cannot anticipate the coming bumps or steer into curves, drivers can. For those of us contending with digiphrenia, becoming a driver means taking charge of choice making, especially when that means refusing to make any choice at all.

Digital technology is all about choices. Closer to a computer game than a continuous narrative, the digital path is no longer inevitable, but a branching hierarchy of decision points. The digital timeline moves not from moment to moment, but from choice to choice, hanging absolutely still on each command line—like the number on a digital clock—until the next choice is made and a new reality flips into place.

This freedom to choose and make choices is the underlying promise of the digital era, or of any new technology. Electric lighting gives us the freedom to choose when to sleep; asphalt gives us the choice where to drive our cars; Prozac gives us the freedom to choose an otherwise depressing lifestyle. But making choices is also inherently polarizing and dualist. It means we prefer one thing over another and want to change things to suit our sense of how things ought to be.

Our leading consumer-technology brand, Apple, makes this all too clear: using these devices is akin to taking a bite of the forbidden fruit, exchanging the ignorant holism of Eden for the self-aware choice making of adulthood. The “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” as the myth calls it, introduced humanity to the binary universe of active choice that computers now amplify for us today. As a downside, the new freedom of choice created self-consciousness and shame. Adam and Eve became self-aware and ashamed of their nudity. They were banished from the holism of Eden and went out into the world of yes and no, this and that, Cain and Abel, and good and evil.

The same is true for us today. Our digital technologies empower us to make so many choices about so many things. But the staccato nature of digital choice also thwarts our efforts to stay fully connected to our greater throughlines and to one another. Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix. I am with my daughter, but the phone is vibrating with a new instant message. Even if I choose to ignore the message and be with her, I have been yanked from the intimate moment by the very need to make a choice. Of course, I can also choose to turn off the phone—which involves pulling it out of my pocket and changing a setting—or just leave it and hope it doesn’t happen again.

For many of us trying to reconcile our real and virtual scales of existence, there is almost a feeling of operating at different speeds or in multiple time zones. This sensation comes from having to make precise, up-close, moment-to-moment choices while simultaneously attempting to experience the greater flow we associate with creativity and productivity. Like when you’re writing with great flow and energy, but your Microsoft Word program puts a little green line under one word. Do you stop and check, or do you keep going? Or both? Just like the kid in the backseat of the car, we get a kind of vertigo.

The ancient Greeks would probably tell us our troubles stem from our inability to distinguish between the two main kinds of time,
chronos
and
kairos
. It’s as if they understood that time is simply too multifaceted to be described with a single word.
Chronos
is the kind of time that’s registered by the clock: chronology. It’s not time itself but a particular way of understanding time by the clock. That’s what we literally mean when we say “three o’clock.” This is time
of the clock
, meaning belonging to the clock, or
chronos
.