It Begins Like This

This morning I read a Wall Street Journal article called “Not So Fast” by Granta editor John Freeman. It’s worth the read if you have the time (doubly-so if you don’t have the time) and it begins like this:

The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. “My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

As someone who blogs (and blogs and blogs) and Tweets and Facebooks, met his girlfriend on the Internet, has a hand in raising a daughter of the whatever-comes-after-Y generation, and earns his living advising businesses on how to get ahead in a rapidly changing world, Freeman’s essay hit home.

And what better way to kick-start yet another blog than with a reminder that we’re all gonna die and a plea for spending our time doing the things that are most important to us. Like, ummm, blogging?  Well no, not really — actually, not at all. But after blogging about social media, marketing and business for the past few years I did want to make a place on the web to share my thoughts about (to paraphrase Freeman) what I want to do, what I want to say, what and who I care about.

So yeah, this is my new personal blog where I’ll share all kinds of things.  The things I’m doing, thinking and what I find interesting — well, anything and everything except business-talk. And god knows the world has been not-s-patiently awaiting a blog about the (hopefully not so boring) minutiae of my life. So this blog is less about the things I’m doing to be fast, and more about the things I do when I’m trying to be slow. Or something like that.

So who knows — we’ll see how it goes, right? If you like what you see, I hope you’ll come back now and then or subscribe to the RSS feed. That would be hella cool. If not, no hard feelings — we all need to make choices about the best way to squander away what little time we have left.

Peace out for now…

Tags: greg verdino, social media, technology, verdino