Drowning in Life

The experience of feeling as though one is drowning in modern life is now common enough among senior people that it has acquired a particular shape. The shape is not catastrophic in any single moment. It is, more often, the cumulative weight of small attentional demands that have, over the last decade, increased to a level no previous generation of senior people would have recognised.

The demands are familiar. The number of passwords required to navigate a normal week. The number of messaging platforms each of which contains conversations that someone is waiting on a reply to. The number of calendar invitations that arrived during the previous meeting. The accumulation of unfinished items across what feels like a single mental queue but is, on inspection, fifteen separate queues, each running independently, each producing the small low-grade ping of something not yet attended to. The newsfeed updating in the background of the phone, the email subject lines that appear in the notification preview, the texts arriving from numbers that may or may not be from people who matter. None of these, individually, is heavy. All of them, in aggregate, are the air the senior person is now breathing.

What this produces, structurally, is a quality of attention that is unable to land on any single thing for long enough to actually meet it. The conversation with the spouse happens against the background of the phone on the table. The meeting with the team happens against the background of the calendar's next demand. The hour that was supposed to be for thinking is instead the hour during which the email is processed and the messages are answered and the small administrative items are cleared. The thinking, displaced, happens in the gaps between things, which are too short for the kind of thinking the senior work actually requires.

What is harder to register, from inside the experience, is that this is not the natural state of senior work. It is a structural consequence of how the tools of the last decade have been configured, and how the cultural norms around availability have shifted. The senior person who is reachable at all times is operating under a contract that did not exist twenty years ago, and the contract is silently doing damage to the quality of attention that the senior role actually requires.

The work that addresses this is not, primarily, the work of using fewer platforms or installing better notification settings. Those moves help. They are not the work. The work is the slower recognition that the senior person has, often without quite naming it, surrendered the right to be unavailable, and that the right to be unavailable is structurally connected to the kind of work she is actually meant to be doing at this stage.

The right to be unavailable is not the right to disappear. It is the right to be the person for whom certain hours, certain rooms, certain conversations are not interruptible by the running queue of low-grade demands. It is the right to think for an hour without the phone reporting in. It is the right to be at the dinner without the screen on the table. It is the right to read the team report without the email open in the next window. Each of these rights is small. Each of them was once the default. Each has been surrendered, in increments, over the last ten or so years.

The cost of the surrender is not principally a cost of efficiency. The senior person is, in fact, often more efficient with the running queue than without it. The cost is a cost of presence. The presence the spouse experiences. The presence the team experiences. The presence the senior person experiences in their own life. Presence is the quality of attention that lands and stays, and it is the quality the running queue has been quietly displacing.

What this looks like, on the inside, is the experience of arriving at the end of a week and being unable to retrieve, in any specific detail, what happened during the week. The calendar is documented. The deliverables are filed. The conversations, when reconstructed, are reconstructible. What is not retrievable is the felt experience of the week, because the attention required to encode the experience as it was happening was elsewhere, processing the queue. The week ran. The person who ran it was not, in any deep sense, in the week.

The drowning, then, is not in the volume of demands. It is in the quality of attention the demands have displaced. The senior person who feels she is drowning is, structurally, accurate in the feeling. She has been swimming in something thinner than the air the work was meant to be done in.

The Diagnostic is a place to look at what the running queue has been costing in attention, and what reclaiming the quality of attention would, structurally, require. Thirty minutes, free, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

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