Is "Multitasking" Spiritually Healthy?

I regularly see the current generation referred to as “different.” One way it is “different,” so it goes, it that it is a “multi-tasking” generation.

I have one word for this timorously trenchant cultural analysis. Bunk.

It is true that younger people are doing many things at once. This is obvious if you’ve watched anyone under 30 use a computer or a cell phone, or play a video game. Many of their brains have been trained from an early age to almost-instinctively use technology to search or explore.

But are they better able to handle multi-tasking than their parents or grandparents? Have they made a significant evolutionary step and become so advanced that they can talk on the phone, listen to music, check their e-mail, and drink Red Bull while driving a 7000-pound Excursion?

Have their brains become so multi-taskingly wired that they can process, absorb and analyze simultaneous streams of data from five or six different sources? No.

From an evolutionary standpoint, human beings have changed not one whit from the days before cars and TV. It is true that we are healthier and living longer. But our essential physiological and neurological makeup is unchanged.

It was a mere 110 years ago that our grandparents or great-grandparents or great-great grandparents were walking or relying on horses for transportation. To get information they relied on neighbors, bought a newspaper, or went to hear a speech in the evening. For entertainment they chatted, played games, read books, went visiting, or occasionally went out.

Multi-tasking has consequences beyond any real or imagined increase in productivity, and certainly beyond any notion that you are living a “full” life.

Most people will eventually discover that multi-tasking not only does not indicate a “full” life, but rather an empty one. The fullness of life is found in going deep and savoring, not in rapidly skimming everything everywhere.