This post is inspired by a post by “The Diary of a CEO”. Inherent to the piece is the debilitating effects of short form media on the brain. Studies are being done and apparently results are starting to roll in. What we are about to learn will be unsurprising to us people watchers who have been witnessing a degradation in human interaction.

The writing I’m doing today is in advance of a skating occasion booked for 135 minutes from now quite distant from my seated position. Since time is short, I could have decided to spend the time in passive short form but instead I chose an active pursuit requiring executive function. Consequently, there will be something more of value produced.

This blog has been active since 2009. That’s a fairly long time and has required a continual application of small bursts of periodic energy in context of what’s deemed to be a fair distribution of my time. I do it because I care. I do it because I know it my heart that I offer value for folks who are open. I know through experience and statistical history that few have an attention span for this despite my eloquence. I am gifted with the written word so others’ lack of attention in no way is attributable to a perception of poorly focused fodder. The technical connection between search engines and posts also plays a role but my intuition concludes that folks are more inclined to seek more immediate stimuli in quest of their appetite for gratifying brain nourishment.

The headline in Calgary this morning is that a toddler in a stroller was run down in a cross walk. Parents survived. It was in broad daylight on a Sunday. The child has died. I’ve witnessed impatient drivers all over town. There have been deaths and there is no question in my mind that the affects of technology is contributory. People are less compelled to engage in conversation because they now value text over voice. Folks are reticent to complain because of the gaslighting effect. Kids are isolated because this condition is preferential to being bullied. Then there is a school shooting and we rightfully mourn but carry on without implementing real change. The rate of which police officer are absent on stress leave is 30 per cent while infractions are unenforced because they are deemed innocuous. Those unenforced laws lead to the kind of behavior creep that emboldens 4×4 trucks to run intersections thereby killing kids. Is the retracement of our civil society going to continue or are we going to return to principled conduct exemplary of frontal cortex executive function?