Recently I was having a conversation with Jordan, a first-year IV staff that I'm privileged to train this year with IV at UNC. He told me about a book he read this summer describing the hyper-multi-tasking generation as having the problem of continuous partial attention. People are always trying to do so many things at once that no one ever focuses on anything any more. So the things that require absolute focus don't get done at all or get done sloppily.
As I'm hitting the mid-point of year number two back at UNC after a nine year hiatus, I'm seeing the same concept applied to these students' relationships. Every one is lonely. Every one feels isolated. Every one is hurting and wishing they had people in their lives to really walk alongside them. And yet everyone is surrounded by people with whom they have some small degree of depth.
This feeling in and of itself is nothing new. Poets and authors have long written of the ache of isolation, the deep and profound alone-ness that comes with being alive in a world that was intended to run on unbroken, perfect relationships but instead has been ruined by sin.
What is new about my students' experience of this deep, abiding ache is the number of people in orbit in their lives while they feel it. Technology keeps them "connected" via e-mail, cell phones and "friends" on Facebook. So they have literally hundreds or thousands of people super-saturating their lives at very shallow levels and absolutely no one that they actually invest the time in to have genuine relationships. Their lives are mostly marked by thin relationships that do not serve as genuine community.
Everyone has a push-pull with intimacy. We all desperately want it and we all fear it when it actually comes our way. The technological society has facilitated our ability to keep everyone at a "safe" distance away that then damns us to a life lived full of continuous, partial relationships.
2 comments:
Alex, you've summed it up quite well, I don't think I could have said it more succinctly. This is a thing I've often felt was a issue, but to now stop and really have it pointed out, I see it's not just an issue, it's a big problem. From both work-load and relationship standpoint, we're (I'm) so busy with so many things, it is really hard to do things well.
On this same note, have I ever told you that you're on facebook?
yeah, i know i'm on facebook--you set me up there and i've got my own page that i never use. i use facebook to help me put names and faces together and occasionally for pictures for prayer letters!
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