"Just Let Me Use My Gadgets"

DSMVWL THS

#1 – 9:39 AM July 21, 2009

"And so I can live with rude." By which he means, he can live with _being_ rude. Well, good to know you accept your own rudeness, Mr. Asperger's.

DSMVWL THS

#2 – 9:45 AM July 21, 2009

P.S. I just went 2 weeks without my iPhone -- the touchscreen crapped out, and it took a while to get a replacement.

I went back to reading dead-tree magazines on the subway, making notes with pen and paper, and not checking email as frequently. And the sky did not fall.

phisrow

#3 – 9:55 AM July 21, 2009

I think that that was more of a denial than a rebuttal.

styrofoam

#4 – 11:21 AM July 21, 2009

To quote that NYT piece making the rounds (apologies for not linking the source):

"John Ratey, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a specialist on the science of attention, explained that when people use digital devices, they get a quick burst of adrenaline, “a dopamine squirt.” Without it, people grow bored with simpler activities like driving. Mr. Ratey said the modern brain is being rewired to crave stimulation, a condition he calls acquired attention deficit disorder.

“We need that constant pizzazz, the reward, the intensity,” he said. He largely dismisses the argument that people need the time in the car to be productive. “The justification for doing work is just that — a justification to be engaged,” he said.

"

====

The last sentences are what resonate with me, because I'm fully guilty of it. If I don't want to pay attention in a meeting, I start "getting things done". That then extends to when I'm the odd person out in a conversation, or sitting around at home with my family, etc- and I'm not happy with the results.

If there's an issue at work that's going on, I tend to stay engaged until it's finished- but this means that I've usually been checking email long enough that another issue has arisen, and so on- so I never actually stop working.

My advice to at least allow some period of time to let your work not define you. Take the time out to immerse yourself what you do in your leisure time, and who you spend it with. Yes, it feels like life moves at a snail's pace and your frenzied mind wants total immersion all the time- but sometimes it's nice to let it disappear for a few hours. Also keep in mind that email begets email- if you quit responding, the "hot issue" usually stays right where it was until the next business day when you pick up again. There's always the fear of the 'endless mountain of email', but that does taper off once you stop responding.

I'm preaching this lesson, but I'm not entirely adhering to it yet. But I'm getting more comfortable with the fact that if my job can't function without me for a few hours at a pop, (or god forbid, a week) then something desperately needs to change. I've been unable to decompress on a couple of vacations because of "important things I'm checking in on." On the flip side, the vacations I've just left everything at home and not tied in have proved to be the most relaxing ones I've had in recent memory.

Brian's job is stressful and fast paced, to be certain. (I've received awfully quick responses from him on occasion, and it was easy to tell it was rapid-fire moments of spare time on the phone) My line of work isn't exactly similar, but I'll say that I was able to keep up that sort of connected life back when it involved 1 way pagers and a need to establish a dialup connection in order to respond- and I kept it up until now. But after 15 years of it, it takes its toll. I don't know if it's because I'm getting older, or it's just that family's putting a different perspective on it- probably both. But leaving the laptop in the office and the smartphone off are the only ways I can really relax nowadays. It's nice to feel important, but I'm finding that it's nicer yet to decompress and get your stimuli from the outside world on your own terms.

grimc

#5 – 12:15 PM July 21, 2009

He defends his use of gadgets because it's part of his job. Which means this is really about his job, and not the iPhone.

And while I think he has somewhat of a point about evolving social conventions, there's a limit to that argument. It's still rude to whip out a book and start reading it as someone's trying to have a conversation with you, just as thousands of years ago young Amonthep was probably scolded by his mother for reading a papyrus at the dinner table.

styrofoam

#6 – 12:51 PM July 21, 2009

Gadgets are his job- but you need to leave your job at work sometime. It's more difficult because the gadgets help to extend the workplace to anyplace you are- but work-life balance is something to keep in mind.

It's one thing to say "it's no big deal, Lisa is cool with it", but maybe she's not as cool with it as he'd like to think.

The difference between "he's just not that into you" and "it's not that he's not into you, it's just that he's more into work related people or anybody else on the other end of email" is a hard one to explain to a SO.

Yeah yeah, social conventions are changing and everybody's doing it. But some people aren't as attuned to delicate social nuances as most techno-geeks.

Shannon

#7 – 4:37 PM July 21, 2009

Cell phones, especially cell phones that connect to email/im/etc, are forcing people to be "always on"... they create a world where responses are expected instantly and at all hours. This degrades the quality and depth of the responses, and hugely increases stress as it eliminates private time, and time away from work (and anyone else who might call).

Independent of whether it's rude to answer the phone/email no matter where one is, to me the bigger question is whether I would WANT to have that load on my life -- and if I'm on the other end of the call, whether I would want to force that load onto someone else.

People need downtime.

I spent way too much of my life in this mode (always connected) and now that I've started unplugging for longer and longer periods, I appreciate it more and more -- although I admit it was VERY stressful at first not being connected.