The long, slow burn
On the Sistine Chapel, trending videos, and the problem of ultra-short-term feedback mechanisms crowding out the time and energy needed for constructing good traits in the long term
Most good things worth keeping aren’t created in an instant. They take time. This applies whether we’re talking about physical things (like painting the Sistine Chapel or carving the Lincoln Memorial) or abstract ones (like inventing calculus or codifying the principle of checks and balances).
■ These observations are self-evident. And yet, it is hard to build these things into ordinary life, no matter how necessary the process may be. The durable things that really matter in life, like character and integrity, can’t be flipped on like a switch. They run on a wholly different timeline than much of the rest of life.
■ A significant hazard of our particular era is the way we’ve invited phenomenally powerful ultra-short-term feedback mechanisms into our lives, designed and engineered to pull our attention to what’s popular right now. Social media and smartphones, full of “likes” and daily trends and torrential notifications, are the creations of people with a lot of money riding on the outcome of whether they can get lots of people to react like circus animals to constant stimulation.
■ But the odds are close to zero that anyone is going to be driven towards the durable things that are worth having by the engagement of the moment. Virtually nobody’s going to build good character traits while trying to trend on TikTok.
■ If people are overstimulated into caring about what other people think of them right now, there’s not going to be much attention left over for caring about what we’re making of ourselves in the long run.
■ It’s doubtful there are easy answers, particularly because great character traits don’t have much of a marketing budget. But the longer it takes us to put some real thought into the matter, the greater the danger that we will look back from the future on this era and lament that nobody took sufficient action before hollowing out the mechanisms that could have saved us.