Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.
I wanted to talk about importance—about how we know something is important and how we know something is not important—and how that method of measuring importance has been somewhat impaired in our information superhighway age.
I wanted to talk about letters because that is exactly what I found myself talking to my father and mother about some weeks ago. I was inundated with messages, and I asked them how many messages they had to deal with back in the days before even telephones existed. Back when the primary methods of entertainment and information were radio, and people used to send letters to each other in order to communicate because there was no electronic method of doing so.
My mother said she had a lot of friends who were really, you know, avid letter writers, so she used to get multiple letters every week—like maybe four or five. My father said maybe twice a week, and on really uneventful months, maybe a few—like four or five a month. And it varied, of course, depending on how many people one was in contact with and how much information people wanted to share.
But I got to thinking about the process of letters, how they're composed, how they're sent, how much time they take to reach the person for whom they're intended. And I quickly realized that time plays a huge role in it, doesn't it?
It takes time to live life. It takes time to think about, “Okay, I have lived life for a month, and now these are the things that stand out.” And then it takes time to compose the letter because you're curating your life. You'll mention only the things that you think are important, and you leave out most of it because there is a limited amount of space in the letter. And also because, you know, not everything is worth mentioning.
Then you write the letter; you take time to write the letter in a very proper way because readability matters. And then you send it, and then you wait for the letter to get to the person you have sent it to. That person gets the letter a few days later, by which time, if there was something urgent in it, it is probably already outdated. And if there wasn’t anything urgent in it, then they read the letter and absorb it because it is a valuable thing. It stands out from the mundane reality of their life.
They were doing work, they were living life, they were doing other things, and then the letter comes. They take time out of their life to read that letter, to absorb it, to appreciate it, and to think about the person who sent the letter. Then they preserve the letter because they can. It doesn't take much space, and they preserve the letter so that they may perhaps read it at a later point in time.
In all of this, time played a huge role. Time was the limiting factor. Time and space got in the way of the letter. And almost miraculously, they made the experience important because we measure things—we measure how important something is based on how much time and how much space they occupy.
I mean, in our times, practically 90% of the value of a luxury item is its price. And if a thing does not cost that much, then it must have less value. We measure the value of things in our life using how much they cost.
I got to thinking about our messaging systems, about the systems that we use to contact each other. How easy it is to contact anyone—even with a video call. And as far as text messaging goes, that's even easier and faster. I mean, faster doesn't even come into it. It's instantaneous. And in fact, the thing that gets in the way of getting to a message that has been sent to you and reading it and appreciating it is, again, time—but it is a lack of time.
People can send you whatever they want, whenever they want, and it will get to you instantaneously. Whether or not you are able to get to it, read it, and reply depends on how much time you have. And quite possibly, the reason you don't have time is because you are reading other messages. Forget getting four messages a week. You're getting orders of magnitude higher as far as the number of messages is concerned. On an hourly basis, your message boxes are full.
People are sending you random stuff—a link, a video, maybe a single word or a single emoji. Sometimes people are not writing longer messages. Letter writing is a forgotten art almost. People talk about it. And the result of all this has been that there has been a great flattening as far as meaning and importance are concerned. In the life of someone who lived before the time of telephones, a letter stood out. It was important because you could tell that it took time, space, and effort to produce it and to bring it to you.
Now, we don’t get letters. We don’t get messages that are of vital importance. We get much more by way of messaging, and all of it has the same value—which is zero. If, in your messaging landscape right now, you were to look at two messages and try to decide which one is more important, which one is something that you will return to later and re-read because it has intrinsic value of its own, you might struggle to find the answer to that question.
One of the things that our electronic messaging landscape has done to us is that it has flattened all our messages into the same level of importance. The meme that a friend sent you is of the same importance as an office email. The office email is of the same importance as a video link someone sent to you. And as a result of all this, we live in a time where nothing is more important or less important than any other thing.
And a side effect of this is that our understanding of what is important is now a free-for-all thing. It is out there, and people are looking to decide for us what is important for us. So a quarrel between two social media influencers becomes the most important thing in our life, despite the fact that if we look at real life, we have other more important things to worry about. But a social media platform powered by an algorithm that feeds on our emotions has managed to become something that can decide for us what is more important.
In this attention-based economy of ours, a politician or a political party spokesperson can stand on a stage, either real or virtual, and tell us that their personal religious agenda is more important than the future of your children or the fact that you don’t have enough money to buy food for your family.
And people fall for it too because we have lost our ability to measure importance. The scale we use to decide what is more important and what is less important is no longer in our hands. And it is out there in the hands of people with power and advertisers and corporations that feed us “important” things using an algorithm.
Just so I'm clear, I’m not really calling for a return to the good old days like an old man. What I am calling for is more control over the mechanisms in our brain that decide what is more important and what is less important. Because if we allow this brave new world of ours to decide what is more important for us, it will tell us. And what it will tell us will probably not be the right answer.
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Disclaimer: This episode transcript has been refined and formatted using an AI tool for clarity and readability.
