Nowadays, successful people always seem to be living in the fast lane. Always super-busy and faithfully multitasking, they check their e-mails on their laptop and answer a call on their landline while sending off a text from their mobile. Can we still be happy and successful if we live in the slow lane? Are these two modes of being opposed to each other? Is new technology disconnecting us from one another and even from ourselves?
David Levy, a computer scientist, has lived in the fast world but he has always yearned for a quieter and more contemplative life. In the slow lane, he discovered the art of calligraphy, which requires time, patience and concentration.
Levy’s new book, “Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives,” is a reflection on our relationship with digital tools, social media, smartphones and the Internet. There is a growing awareness that digital devices hijack our attention and are even addictive.
We are now faced with the following dilemma, explains Levy: “Our devices have vastly extended our attentional choices, but the human attentional capacity remains unchanged. (Some would even argue that it has actually shrunk.) And so we must figure out how to make wise choices, and to figure out what constitutes a wise choice, so we can use our digital tools to their best advantage and to ours.”
Levy believes that our online activity is a craft; in other words, a task which should be carried out skillfully. Levy mentions that craft played an important role in everything Apple founder Steve Jobs accomplished. Jobs, Levy says, was also introduced to calligraphy, when he was studying at Reed College. He took a calligraphy class in which he learned about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations and about what makes great typography great.
“It was beautiful, historical, and artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating… If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts,” Jobs later explained.
Jobs made it a point to craft functional but beautiful products and, Levy argues, we should learn how to craft online practices that are efficient and purposeful.
One essential principle in this book is that we perform best when we are attentive and relaxed. However, when we are online, we are mostly distracted and not at ease. We automatically check our e-mails and Facebook before focusing on the task we are supposed to get done. We tend to be tremendously impatient — when a page fails to load quickly in our web browser, we cannot wait and instead move quickly to another task.
All of these micro-decisions are driven mainly by unconscious emotional reactions, which make us waste time and have a disproportionate impact on what will happen during the rest of the day.
Levy believes we need to take charge of our online lives. Once we decide to pay attention to the way we work and the choices we make when we are online, we are in a better position to act more efficiently. It is very easy to lose track of our priorities, because there are so many things ready to grab our attention. The best strategy to cope with so many tempting distractions is to be mindful so that we focus on what is important to us.
One major belief that prevents us from being mindful while we are online is that multitasking can help us achieve more in less time. Many educators argue that multitasking is a useful skill, particularly when it comes to modern technology.
However, there is a misconception regarding multitasking. We understand that multitasking means performing several tasks at the same time, but we commonly use it to mean we are switching between several tasks. The root of the problem is why we switch tasks. It can be hard not to look at a new message, or not to check who is calling our phone. The truth is that our thoughts, feelings and emotions often lead us to switch tasks unconsciously.
According to Eyal Ophir, who conducted a study on multitasking when he was a researcher at Stanford University, people who are heavy multitaskers may — in the long run — be training themselves not to focus.
“You teach yourself that something more exciting might be just around the corner, behind that notification, or the app on your mobile phone, or the e-mail you haven’t checked,” he said.
In other words, people who are constantly multitasking have different priorities. They are willing to give up the advantages of focus so they do not miss an unexpected but rewarding surprise.
Levy believes that it is possible to multitask in a calmer and more focused way. Whether we are online or not, our lives are a succession of moments determined by the choices we make. All we need is to make skillful choices and stay focused or shift our attention as necessary.
“I sense that we as a culture may be preparing to enter into a broader and deeper conversation about the place of all things digital in our lives,” says Levy. He worries about the effects of distraction, mindless acceleration and the loss of attentional acuity, but does not think that the internet is the cause.
In “Mindful Tech,” Levy encourages the reader to nurture habits of mind and body that can help us make good use of new technologies.
For example, a team of neuroscientists studied how our brains react to negative news concerning political candidates. The study showed that we react well to candidates whose opinions are similar to ours. When candidates voice unacceptable positions, brain centers concerned with emotion rather than reason are active. The study concluded that it is possible to ignore these unconscious reactions as long as we engage in honest self-reflection.
“Mindful Tech” is all about creating a more aware and more meaningful relationship with our digital devices.
“For two decades, I have been bringing people together to talk about the place of digital technologies in their lives,” Levy concludes. “What I have discovered along the way is quite simple: When we talk about the technologies, we are ultimately talking about our lives, and about their meaning and value. And when we come together to have caring and careful conversations about the place of the technologies, we establish an intimacy of connection that many of us long for.”
Book Review: Creating a more meaningful relationship with our digital tools
Book Review: Creating a more meaningful relationship with our digital tools
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Measure of Progress’ by Diane Coyle
The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today.
In “The Measure of Progress,” Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers.
When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy?
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Stranger in the Village’
- Baldwin’s narrative transcends mere anecdote, evolving into a meditation on the legacy of Western colonialism and slavery
Author: James Baldwin
James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” from his seminal collection “Notes of a Native Son,” is a searing exploration of race, identity, and the weight of history.
Baldwin juxtaposes his experience as the first Black man in a remote Swiss village — where villagers gawk, children shout racial epithets, and his presence sparks both fascination and fear — with the entrenched racism of America.
Through this contrast, he dissects the paradox of being perceived as an exotic “stranger” in Europe while remaining an oppressed outsider in his homeland.
Baldwin’s narrative transcends mere anecdote, evolving into a meditation on the legacy of Western colonialism and slavery.
In Switzerland, the villagers’ “innocent” othering lacks the violent history of American racism, yet Baldwin reveals how both contexts dehumanize Blackness.
He argues that white America, built on the subjugation of Black people, cannot escape its past — a past that distorts both the oppressor’s and the oppressed’s sense of self.
“People are trapped in history,” he writes, “and history is trapped in them.”
The essay’s power lies in Baldwin’s ability to weave personal reflection with incisive social critique. His encounters in the village mirror the broader African American experience: the exhaustion of being perpetually “seen but not seen,” and the rage born of systemic erasure.
Yet Baldwin resists despair, asserting that acknowledgment of this shared history is the first step toward liberation, even as he questions whether true equality is achievable.
Stylistically, Baldwin’s prose is both lyrical and unflinching, blending vivid imagery with philosophical depth.
The essay’s enduring relevance lies in its piercing examination of otherness and its challenge to confront uncomfortable truths.
Published over seven decades ago, Baldwin’s call to reckon with history’s ghosts remains urgent, a testament to his unparalleled vision and moral clarity.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives’
Authors: Asier Larramendi & Marco P. Ferretti
Today, only three species of elephants survive—the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana), the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus).
However, these modern giants represent just a fraction of the vast and diverse order of Proboscidea, which includes not only living elephants but also their many extinct relatives.
Over the past 60 million years, proboscideans have evolved and adapted across five continents, giving rise to an astonishing variety of forms.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Long Thaw’
- A human-driven, planet-wide thaw has already begun, and will continue to impact Earth’s climate and sea level for hundreds of thousands of years
Author: DAVID ARCHER
In “The Long Thaw,” David Archer, one of the world’s leading climatologists, reveals the hard truth that these changes in climate will be “locked in,” essentially forever.
If you think that global warming means slightly hotter weather and a modest rise in sea levels that will persist only so long as fossil fuels hold out (or until we decide to stop burning them), think again.
Archer predicts that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide we may eventually cancel the next ice age and raise the oceans by 50 meters.
A human-driven, planet-wide thaw has already begun, and will continue to impact Earth’s climate and sea level for hundreds of thousands of years.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The White Planet’
Authors: Jean Jouzel, Claude Lorius and Dominique Raynaud
From the Arctic Ocean and ice sheets of Greenland, to the glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas, to the great frozen desert of Antarctica, “The White Planet” takes readers on a spellbinding scientific journey through the shrinking world of ice and snow to tell the story of the expeditions and discoveries that have transformed our understanding of global climate.
Written by three internationally renowned scientists at the center of many breakthroughs in ice core and climate science, this book provides an unparalleled firsthand account of how the “white planet” affects global climate.
