Chances are that at one point or another in your life you have thought about something, and then not followed through on it. Maybe you planned out a diet only to give up by the third day, or decided on a monthly budget and overspent. I know I find myself guilty of not following through on plans. I'll talk with a friend about catching up but four months later and we never made it happen. (Yeah, sorry about that.) If we're being honest with ourselves, it's virtually impossible not to go through life missing the mark, or falling short on whatever you set out to accomplish. That's just being human. But recently, that gap between thinking (that is, when we in our heads say we will go do something), and doing (when we actually go out and do whatever it is), seems to be widening. As the gap widens, we skew toward getting worse at following through. Why is that happening? Let's take a step back and understand our context.
If you've been on Twitter or Facebook in recent years, you may have noticed the tendency for people to post heartfelt or passionate commentaries. Peeling back the veil you might also notice more often than not those posts don't lead to any tangible action. It's like the person who sits down at the keyboard is utterly independent from the person who stands up, and the thoughts written down track orthogonally to the character and actions of their creator. When it comes to sharing, people now have the option of social affirmation (likes, retweets, comments) as a stand in for the warm fuzziness of actual accomplishment. If thoughts were like itches that couldn't be scratched without action, nowadays they've become impulses assuaged by little acts of online sharing and consumption.
In a more digital age, a widening gap of thinking and doing makes a bit of sense. Without the necessity of physical proximity, computers allow individuals greater freedom of knowledge and exploration. Sharing provides a near effortless path to gratification. Content consumption becomes as easy as *click*. Whereas before the advent of the digital age, access to information was limited by physical proximity, modern connectivity removes this bottleneck. The volume of information one can access has rapidly approached infinity, locking us into a state of perpetual information overload.
One side effect of such an information overload is a tendency toward greater consumption via curation. Instead of reading we watch a video. Instead of listening we scroll through a feed. But unlike a museum curator, the algorithms which curate the feeds predominantly base their decisions on what holds attention, not what is the best content. People are then exposed to a wider range of experiences while spending time browsing. Time on screen chips accumulates, and as one spends more time browsing, they lose time that could be spent experiencing life. It's my guess that as our appetite for experience, for a life fully lived, grows while our time for it decreases, the gap between our thinking and our doing widens.
Ultimately our propensity to fall short of our goals will never change. It's why ambition and failure go hand in hand. But recognizing the pitfalls of the new digital landscape can allow one to acknowledge both its beneficial and negative outcomes. In connecting the world, we seem to have taken incremental steps to disconnect ourselves from it. The very nature of modern technologies, the immediacy which they provide, can encourage individuals to disconnect from their own realities. More often than not, spending time in front of a screen engaging in other people's shared experiences does not augment your own. Slowly but surely, it just widens the gap between our desires and our responses, our thoughts and our actions.