Too Many Needles

 This Oliver Burkeman post ("treat your to-read bucket into a river") is notable for a couple reasons.  First, it's a "they say/I say" posting.  It's "Clary Shirky says this; Nicholas Carr says this, and he's right." (Also worth noting, his "they say" is a bit of a cheap move; it's completely ripped off from Carr... it's CARR who cites Shirky, it's not Burkeman who puts the two in conversation.) Second, Burkeman has a writing tell.... "the wider point here".... which is a great way to make the small, focused point bigger, which is about we have "information overload" in all ways of life... it's our condition.  (in a recent posting, I quote him saying "I think the general point here is...") Third, with almost everything I read of him, the answer is the same: don't beat yourself up! it's impossible to keep up with the pace of modern life!  Accept that and think about the implications of that.  It's his lens - absurdist, shoulder-shrugging, but true in many ways -- that he applies to a variety of areas of modern life.   

His good point is that all the self-help, modern living advice appears on the horizon of "it can all get done,"  But, my complaint is that you still need to answer emails, for instance, in my world.  And the "big rocks" idea is a good one generally for some stuff at least (paying bills...)

The real trouble, according to the leading techno-optimist Clay Shirky, wasn't information overload, but "filter failure". We needed – and we'd eventually get – more sophisticated ways to filter the wheat from the online chaff. And then we'd no longer feel overwhelmed. 

 

Yeah… no. I assume you'd agree that the problem of your to-read pile is very much not one of filter failure. It's not that you're deluged with things you don't care about, and need help figuring out what's truly of interest. It's that you're overwhelmed by things you do want to read. All the books on your bedside table, all those bookmarks in your browser, or articles saved to Instapaper – all of them seem like they might be right up your street, or crucial to your professional success, or might contain some nugget of wisdom you'd benefit from absorbing. The problem, as the critic Nicholas Carr explained, isn't filter failure. It's filter success. In a world of effectively infinite information, the better you get at sifting the wheat from the chaff, the more you end up crushed beneath a never-ending avalanche of wheat.

 

And so, for example, the reading recommendations I encounter via Twitter are much more tailored to my concerns than those I might encounter via a newspaper, because I choose who I follow on Twitter; it's like having a thousand assistants scouring the infoverse for whatever might pique my interest. My challenge, information-wise, isn't about finding a needle in a haystack. It's that I'm confronted on a daily basis, in Carr's words, by "haystack-sized piles of needles." 

 

The wider point here is that lots of the other ways in which we feel overwhelmed are problems of "too many needles" as well. They involve the attempt to divide our finite time and attention among too many things that all have a legitimate claim on them. Some of these are "good problems to have": for example, if you're blessed with work you love, or a creative passion you're good at, you may often feel torn between multiple projects you're excited to launch. Others are the familiar problems of Life Under Late Capitalism™, like the feeling that there's simply not enough time in the day to be a good parent while staying afloat financially. What they all have in common is that the things you're choosing between all genuinely matter, and would benefit from more time than you can give them.

(he concludes)

Coming at life this way definitely entails tough choices. But it's liberating, too, as you slowly begin to grasp that you never had any other option. There's no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that it was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place. I like to think of it as the productivity technique to beat all productivity techniques: finally internalizing the implications of the fact that what's genuinely impossible – the clue is in the name! – cannot actually be done.