My problem with the present is it’s too present.

                  Nonstop news ensures nonstop panic as media outlets vie for eyeballs. Newspeople, my tribe for many decades, relish bad news, not because we’re ghoulish but because, like any competitors, we crave success. The worse the news the more glam the news-bringer, the heftier the profits (or smaller the losses). As news channels proliferate, eyeballs – and revenues – flow to the scariest and away from more cautious publishers who seek to double-check. Legacy news media are often hobbled by a traditional commitment to maintaining their readers’ trust, which is all well and good until those readers decamp for spicier fare. Beat out our competitors or get the story right is a constant conundrum in today’s newsrooms.

                  I want to know what’s going on. Who doesn’t? I want to know promptly so I don’t appear clueless. (Folks who know what’s going on make for more interesting interlocutors.) I want to know so my published words don’t feel musty. Outdated awareness is milk gone sour – no thanks. 

                  Urge for currency complicates efforts to be wise. The more time I spend hoovering headlines, the less time hovering in delectable indeterminacy. The Strait of Hormuz trumps, if you’ll forgive the verb, John Locke on empiricism. The human brain cannot multitask, self-help books notwithstanding. Patterns vanish in a blur of data. 

                  This much noise is new. Think of Socrates tutoring those callow youths in the agora. They talked about big ideas because, heck, what else was there to talk about? How could Truth, Virtue, Justice, Wisdom, The Good compete for attention with the price at the pump or first-round draft picks? The more news, the less thought, the less thought, the more susceptible one becomes to the nonsense du jour. Stupefied by data, we’re prone to dopey error (witness Trump with a capital T). 

                  How to combat this confusion by profusion?

                  Cultivate calm. Darken your screens for a spell. Take a walk. Read a book. Unsubscribe. Pray. Cozy up to silence. Marinate your mind in mysteries.

                  Easier said than done. Wordsworth wrote a famous poem about the problem:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

                  The marvels of this sonnet repay quiet contemplation, for which – naturally! – we lack time; but its theme is no less pressing now than when, two centuries back, the poet penned it. We’re too busy to be! Attention to getting and spending – and Internet browsing – leaves no time for the sea, moon, wind or humanity’s long recall. “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Wouldn’t you rather be a primitive in his dank cave admiring mythic deities than a news junkie imbibing the spew of fiends and fools. So what we’ve got flush toilets if it costs us flushed minds!

                  Modernity stupefies. More informed, we’re less aware. Up to the minute, we’re down in the mouth. My desperate recourse, like Wordsworth’s, is words. Conjure old wave-wet Triton trumpeting and you can’t stop smiling.