The heat of the moment

I've gone off 'living in the moment'. It is true that the past cannot be changed and the future cannot be controlled. Yes, we must beware of letting hopes, fears, regrets and wistfulness dominate the foreground of our experience. However, and it's a big however, there isn't time in the brevity of the moment, to consider. In the moment there is only immediate reaction, instinct, the heat.

It is time which tells. Time tells because deep thought is slow, no matter how fast events are. We need to digest experience and ideas, mull things over. We need time to catch ourselves out in the errors of perception and judgement which are part of normal fallible human consciousness. We need to mull over and re-examine things. And because of this, we simply can't think properly about everything ourselves, there isn't time.

This is what we need experts for. We need to outsource the time to become well-informed about some difficult issues, so that we can focus on others. I don't think we are 'tired of experts': reviews, curated selections and price comparison sites abound. The trouble is that our global connectivity means we are called upon to develop to too many opinions too quickly.

As we struggle with the overload, we are drawn to hyper-real clarity: soundbites, slogans, shortcuts. We don't want the ifs and buts, the complexities - indeed we suspect them to be the mark of the weasel, instead of honest respect for a difficult issue.

Processing deep thoughts takes time, but life is fast and getting faster. The amount of the world to which each of us is exposed is huge and getting huger. If we want to stop people managing the overload by radically and dangerously oversimplifying issues, we really need experts. And time.