New Mac

I hope to be posting more now that I have my new MacBook.  I can take it with me everywhere and all the time.  I was not the only one in the store who didn't buy a new iPhone or an iPad, but I certainly was in the minority.  Apple certainly seems to have tapped into whatever is the tempo of the time, or perhaps help create it.

I do not have a Facebook page, partly because I don't want to have to not "friend" clients, and mostly because I don't have any more time.  I waste enough writing these rambling thoughts here, and sending them out to people I mostly don't know.  If I had to be coherent and stay in-touch with the people who really were my "friends" then it would become a burden.

And who has time for Facebook?  Probably many of you do. It's really a generational thing.  For us olders, it takes time away from the time wasting habits we developed before all of this instant technology.  I still get one weekly and three monthly magazines, and that does not include the professional journals.  Those journals are soooo last century.  By the time something is submitted, vetted, edited and published, it is either very arcane to begin with, or has been out on the Internet for months, if not years.

I am also on a couple of professional Lists, and they are full of Chicken Little Psychologists who alert me to every possible threat to the profession, possible ethics violation, acts of Congress that need to be responded to ( and I do), and money trends that rumble through the insurance world, none of which have ever been to our benefit.   But the information is there, and I have to have it.

These lists also alert me to the exciting new developments that are revolutionizing our profession.  Most of them turn out to be clever new words that describe a theory or concept that fell out of favor ten years ago when someone else coined a clever new word for something that had been popular ten years before that. But the information is there, and I have to have it.

I also get many more of my referrals or appointment changes through email, as well as updates from current and former clients -- which I think is helpful and informative, but it takes so much time. I'm not on my computer all day like so many people, because I have to actually sit and talk to people.  So, at the end of the day, or when I get home, I have 150 emails, about ten of which are really informative. But it takes a lot of time. So who has time for Facebook?

I get business because of Facebook.  Those old high school sweet-hearts  seem to pop up just when the marriage is getting very bumpy, and even if nothing actually happens, I hear the phrase "you were talking to HER" much more often in my office now than I ever had in the past.

I know that all of this new "instant" technology has had definite changes in how we think, respond, conceptualize and create.  There is a lot of new research going on trying to determine how all of this "screen time" is affecting developing brains.  And I'm sure it is.

Whether these changes in the brain will hurt the creativity of future generations, as I have already read somewhere, or does playing video games lead to violence or ADHD, the later of which is certainly possible.  It doesn't matter.

From what I saw at the Apple store, being constantly hooked into technology is here to stay, or at least until it is replaced by something lighter, faster and even more omnipresent.

Sitting in silence, staring off into space once was the province of catatonic schizophrenics, but I bet now it will become a luxury, and people will pay $1000 a day to go to some spa in the woods and sit next to a tree, while a highly skilled staff member locks away your iPad for thirty-six hours.

Maybe by next summer I'll have one up and running right here on the Cape.  Make your reservations now.



NB:  The dog is my grand-dog.  She is bigger now and better behaved. Very affectionate, very fast, but a bit skittish.