Maybe, then, it should come as no surprise to me that I sometimes feel that I am merely an "active object" cooperating in an event driven existence:
- I leap into action when an e-mail arrives
- I respond to bills when they arrive in the post
- I set reminders on my phone
- I queue messages in my inbox for later processing
- I leave post-its on the wall
Now, is this a "bad thing"TM? Should I be worried that I should be taking a more considered approach to my interactions? Or, should I rather be taking a second order approach and looking for optimisations in my response time to events and improved heuristics for evaluating the relative priorities of queued requests? Maybe I should be spending time to identify gaps in the my event processing highlighted by event stimuli that I don't act on, or only partially handle? Maybe this is the great search for closure.
Furthermore, maybe I should really be looking for large scale patterns that relate the set of actions and events that I manage, to those of the other people around me. In this way I might find ways of enhancing and improving my life and those around me as I interact with others who share in this cooperative complex system that makes up our civilisation.
1 comment:
I agree that being event driven seems to be part of our browser existence. And I think you're right - that we may be missing out on different aspects of life, simply because they don't jump out at us.
One thought is that responding to events was probably also part of humans' early existence, particularly in response to danger. It seems likely that people would jump into action in response to threats (e.g. a lion). However, it seems like danger-activated responses such as being event-driven and stress are aspects of human beings that were initially adaptive but now no longer are.
I recently had an awesome day at work when I had no internet access, and as a result my work "events" pretty much disappeared. I spent the afternoon reading a WHOLE chapter of a book (rather than skimming) and discovered some interesting links I wouldn't have picked up on in my normal browsing style.
I think that being driven by events is fine when you're in danger, but can be exhausting (and can detract from acting or responding independently) when it's a normal way of life. But because it's all around us, I'm not sure of how it can be managed, without turning into a hermit.
Al
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