I believe the secret to avoiding this fate is to focus on the present…on what is immediately in front of you. My mother imparted some powerful advice from her late-60s, Ram Dass reading, college years: ‘Be Here Now’. I just have to figure out how to apply it in 2010.

Go to any concert and you will find a sea of fans (myself included) taking photos, BBMing their friends, recording video, tweeting jokes, and maybe even livestreaming the whole thing. They are all contributing to the shared mosaic of the experience. Each of these acts, however, takes the individual one step further from actually engaging with the music and breaks their attention into ever-smaller chunks. I don’t think we should stop sharing – experiences are more enjoyable when shared with friends – but we need to learn to cope with this reality. This constant adrenaline rush of new stimulation and interaction is killing my ability to carry a feeling beyond a few seconds, and I doubt I am alone. Constantly trying to process and fit my thoughts into this mosaic of other people’s perspectives dilutes them further.

Part of my job is to stay at least 5 years ahead of mainstream society in my relationship with technology. For example, I haven’t had cable since 2004 and have been using the Internet as my primary source of moving pictures ever since. I am not alone in living this way. There are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of us explicitly trying to live way ahead of the curve. We are the canaries in the coal mine, and some are already dropping off.

Paradoxically, I think the solution to these problems is to dive further online. Technology is not just changing how we communicate, but also how we think. We need to learn to think clearly in the face of these distractions, to sustain attention long enough for deep contemplation and powerful emotions. Reflection is the one way I have found to do that.

In my experience, the times when I am most ‘present’ are when I am looking back on the recent past. I regularly write long Facebook messages and emails to old friends, former lovers, and other people that I trust. They are just short stories about something that had happened to me recently. Responses were explicitly meant to be optional. It is when I am writing these messages that I am my most lucid and honest. I now look back on them the same way someone looks back on an old diary. The messages are my memories.

These messages are important to me and they will only get more important as the neurological memories fade. All of us are going to be remembering 2009 through old status updates, Flickr photos, blog entries, and Facebook messages. Do yours convey the true depth and complexity of that year? Mine don’t. It is time to start making better memories: to experience things more fully, and reflect on them more deeply. It is time to double down on personal transparency and openness.

This is why I am – for the first time ever – starting a truly personal blog. I know, I’m definitely not ahead of the curve on this one. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it, and I hope no more than a dozen people do. It will be as uncensored and as honest as I can force myself to make it. It won’t have a public URL, or comments available. You won’t find a link from here. It will simply be one coherent thought or experience, written in the 20-30 minutes before I go to bed each night. I hope that knowing I will have time to reflect on things later will allow me to enjoy them in the present. I hope that by doing this online, instead of on something hidden in a drawer, my thoughts are more forward compatible with how I am going to be accessing them next year.

What do you think? Is it possible to fight fire with fire?