THE next time you are travelling, sitting in your office, walking in a park, roaming in a shopping mall or just hanging out with friends or family, look around you. You will notice folks anxiously scrolling down their mobile phone screens, to catch up with the latest messages, calls, feeds or status updates.

Living in an increasingly fast-paced, interconnected world, which demands urgency at every step, the compulsion to constantly accomplish and advance can be overwhelming. From work-related issues to social media notifications, there is a general perception of urgency in our lives. This urgent way of life obfuscates the line between the actually important and seemingly important tasks.

At work, this involves dealing with last-minute queries, odd deadlines, insane workloads, and the idea that one must be accessible even after office hours. In personal life, this phenomenon translates into overstrained relationships, frequently checking social media updates, and immediately responding to calls and texts.

This ‘always on’ culture requires multitasking. However, our brain lacks the neurocognitive build-up to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. So, it slows down, reducing productivity by about 40 per cent every time we try to multitask. Besides, the attraction for distraction that drives most multitasking can be hard to shut down, thus making it difficult to focus even if we are not doing so. Meanwhile, our dopamine system is de-sensitised by continuous overstimulation. The more overstimulated we are, the less joy we feel. Our brain is exhausted by the repeated desire to process information and make quick decisions. Engaging in an assignment that calls for thought requires a distraction-free environment.

Digital content captures not just our gaze, but also our attention.

A false state of urgency dupes the body into adopting a ‘fight or flight’ response. Our breathing becomes faster, our heart rate and blood pressure go up, and we lose the ability to regulate our emotions. This erratic response might lead to hypertension, hormonal imbalance, sleep deprivation and immune disorders. Thus, the culture of urgency can be deleterious to our physical well-being in the long run.

Digital content captures not just our gaze, but also our attention. Since its inception, technology has been a guileful friend, well-versed in pilfering our mindfulness. This ‘original sin’ of technology reflects the evolution of our interaction with the tools we create and use every day. Today, we have an abundance of online friends, and strive to make even more by liking or sharing content, but we are unaware of what is going on among our close family and friends’ circles, even if they’re living in the same house or neighbourhood.

Social comparison theory explains the urgency phenomenon that describes the urge to constantly feel pressured to accomplish tasks quickly. In our false perception of others achieving more or outpacing us, we feel compelled to keep up with them, culminating in an endless cycle of haste and stress. The lines between our work and leisure are blurred by our dependency on social media, making it challenging to disconnect and engage meaningfully with others. Ironically, this constant connectivity can erode our sense of belonging and contribute to feelings of loneliness and alienation.

Our transition from press to radio to television has taken another step and reached the digital era, where the focus of attention is human attention itself. Over time, each iteration of technology, social media, tablets or smartphones is becoming more and more efficient at capturing our fo-cus. But it is not just our attention which is at stake anymore. With the advent of artificial intelligence, the concept of attention itself has been bi-furcated. On the one hand, human attention is frail and finite. On the other hand, the attention of AI has become vast and refines itself progressively.

The realm of attention has gone beyond the human spirit into the battlefield of cerebral computing.

AI is a double-edged sword, both emancipator and conspirator. It can liberate us from overburden, but can also embroil us further. AI has created a delicate rhythm between the creator and the created. It is important to establish clear boundaries including digital ones to avoid the sense of false urgency that is resulting from excessive assumptions and multitasking. We can become more pragmatic about what is possible to achieve over a day, a week, a year or even a lifespan by acknowledging the limits of our time, strength and attention. The key component is spending time on what is important rather than on what is urgent.

The writer is an assistant professor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine.

fareedmohsin@ymail.com

Published in Dawn, July 30th, 2024