Narcissism is a characterization of luxury, isn’t it? It takes some kind of free mental time to imagine being the center of everything, to imagine that people are thinking of you and not themselves in whatever action or inaction they take.

Rather, how much more energy must some people possess in order to still imagine themselves the focus of other people’s every intention even when saddled with the competing demands of living. (I guess that's why it can be called a disorder.) The busier I become, the less I believe or care that anything anyone does has anything to do with me.

In one of an array of like buildings along a hallway of identical doorways by another twin hallway was a meeting of four people, four laptops, and four handphones. The meeting began with a head turn from the screen and some words directed at the group; and then the meeting suspended with the buzz of a phone, with the chime of an inbox, by a VIP IM, and by the otherwise ceaseless attention to all these begging devices. Two hours and four people, each juggling multiple channels of attention. Focus was absent. Almost nothing useful was exchanged.

I had no idea we had degenerated so far as to call parallel play a meeting. Interaction has been subverted by hyper interactions.

With lots of time to myself in the so-called meeting, I realized it’s no coincidence that we’ve declared an epidemic of attention deficiency in this culture when every demand on our time and desire comes with multiple feeds of information to be attended to and processed. We saturate children and adults with competing demands and then call their concomitant inability to focus psychopathology.

At home at work wherever I am, the news with video rolling and scrolling bars of information, the IM windows and multiple inboxes and people in my office and people on the other end of the phone—each of these a different context, multiple of which I hold in immediate attention simultaneously. I notice now that when I reduce the number of open connections I reach unknowingly to open another. Lately, I’ve begun to stop myself and sit with the agitation of not being preoccupied and of attempting to focus. I’m stunned that this is difficult. In that moment of tension is the feeling of boredom, the blip of endless emptiness.

No matter how strung-out my attention, I still occupy in one part of my life a subculture in which meetings are reserved for people talking to each other to reach some common goal. It models a now alternative way of production and protects me from blind assimilation.

Perhaps most disturbing to me in that 3-factor meeting was that its participants seemed not to notice that a meeting hadn’t occurred and seemed, more so, to delight in the importance conferred by the pretense of show-and-tell busyness. I've been too close to the psychologically damaged to escape feeling sickened by this observation. Isn’t this failure in human connection quasi-sociopathic? How many of our psychological ailments have been linked to a failure to process emotions and experience? More than you know. ...