Halfway. All the time. For everything — just isn’t enough.

It is both humbling and amusing to me that as I grow older I find myself taking on more character traits that can only be described as “curmudgeonly.”

I cannot help but harrumph, like a modern Ebenezer Scrooge, as my thumb flips through endless quips, tips, and modified graphics on phone parade that look like mini versions of the posters you could buy at Successories: a Zen band-aid here, a misappropriated quote from Einstein there, and five tips which will help me become a peace-saturated millionaire while helping me maintain strength, lose weight, and gain flexibility.

It doesn't matter which social media platform you're on, either. These platitudes and feel-good digital bumper stickers are everywhere, even here on LinkedIn. They have many likes, many shares, and many comments that usually never offer more than a sentence comprised of three or fewer words.

We bemoan our lack of attention span. We decry the fact that we have too much to do and not enough time to pack it all in. We are sitting across the table at lunch with a coworker, or (less and less often) at home with our family with our noses watching as this endless stream of “life affirming trivia” passes by, afraid to not consume all of it for fear of missing some sterling nugget of truth.

And speaking of eating, this is not unlike a steady stream of verbal or visual shots of 5-Hour Energy when it would have been far better for you to just sit down and have a proper meal.

I must admit that there is a certain amount of satisfaction and “I told you so” echoing inside as I read about the resurgence of actual paper books, vinyl recordings, and scientific studies validating the little-known fact that multitasking is a myth.

Did you recently see the social post of the one room log cabin that dared you to endure a month there, with all the food, water, and firewood you’d need, in order to receive $100,000 at the end?

Of course, you’d have no internet. No phone.

Scary, isn’t it…

Really?

Although I hated having to do multiple page book reports when I was a middle school and high school student as much as my peers, I am none the less extremely grateful for every aspect of that experience…

Without Google, I had to use the Dewey Decimal System, making my way to a marvelous arrangement of hand-typed index cards firmly affixed via steel rod in a wooden drawer in a wooden cabinet. To this day, I can recall the scent of pulling open those magical little drawers. That smell was the smell of centuries of accumulated human wisdom. That required hopping on my bike and expending energy, navigating through three-dimensional space without the aid of the motor to get there. Since the system was so large, I usually required the assistance of a librarian, which meant having a real face-to-face conversation, and more often than not, following that person on foot to the physical location of the book which contained the information I so desperately needed.

Much has been written about the “externalization of knowledge," and I won't go into any extra detail here. However, I can certainly vouch for the fact that I remember those experiences, and I remember the subjects about which I wrote many, many years after the fact. Whereas, I am prone to ask Siri or Google to repeatedly navigate me to the same places over and over again.

I've been trying to figure out when in my lifetime the tide towards “1 inch deep and 4 miles wide” became the norm. And I can't quite place it.

I realize it has been an insidious slide; virtually imperceptible because of the sheer volume of little changes over a relatively brief period, however, it is jarring to realize just how far we have come, not necessarily for the better.

The most challenging change perhaps, in terms of culture or societal development, I believe, has been the almost universally accepted belief that we must do more, attain more, and consume more in order to be more.

We have become thin. The hollow men, indeed.

One of my Chinese kung-fu teachers communicated to me that there was still much to the art that his deeply aged father refused to teach him. He grew up outside of Hong Kong saturated in this art. He was in his mid-forties at the time and his father well into his eighties.

“I’m still not ready, he says.”

The powerful implication was that his father was willing to carry the deep knowledge to the grave with him rather than invest it in as-yet unready soil.

In our mad attempts to capture every single red herring that runs past us, not to mention go after the red herrings that our so-called superiors tell us to go after or else we might lose our jobs, we find ourselves realizing that the things that we desperately wish we had done are things we actually could have done long ago. Time is now lost. The places we could have attained, though probably still reachable, must be enjoyed in significantly older bodies. And meanwhile, what we have to show for all our efforts seems remarkably thin; we don't remember much of the journey, and the trophies they gave us for simply participating don't communicate much in the way of attainment.

So what are we to do?

Do the hard work of introspection
Do the very hard work of understanding the one or two things…and no more… that truly make you feel alive. Can you tell me the kinds of things you are involved in where you completely lose track of time?

What kinds of activities take you out of your body and out of your mind into a place where everything melds into a ubiquitous singularity? We all have those things. Or at least, we all have memories of those things.

Solidify those memories
Write those things down, and pare them down until you have before you the one or two directions, or activities, or fields of interest, in which you can invest your life, energy, heart and soul. Use a pen.

And then with all of the urgency you can possibly muster, develop those one or two things utilizing the tools of your harried life: calendars, money, transportation, etc. Build your life around these things, not around the corporation that automatically deposits a paycheck for you every two weeks. Unless your day job is truly remarkable, your clients don't genuinely care about the development of your life or your family's life. They care about the profit that you enable them to make.

I believe it's time for those of us who find ourselves aware of the confetti and dross that is swirling all around us, screaming our names and demanding our activity, to become "righteously selfish." Invest in the long form version of yourself, not the Instagram version, or the Twitter version. Write your own life script, and please use ink. Don't take an iPhone photograph of the next significant event in your life, become part of that event.

Go all the way, long form, every time, for the handful of things in your life that truly matter.

Sam Lowe is founder and Chief Creative Officer of BaudelaireSextonBlake, a marketing communications company dedicated to companies and brands that empower individuals to take control of their well being.