Shameless Plug for the Striving Podcast. I started writing this piece before this episode (click-through to listen) aired, which addresses much of what you'll read in this post.
Is this familiar?
I am asleep. Maybe its peaceful; maybe it’s a stress-induced nightmare. 
Whatever. An annoying alarm cleanly breaks me out of sleep. Dreams fade in an instant. It’s time to move. My wife turns off the alarm. I get my bearings. I need to get up.
I leave the warm bed and step into the cold air. Onto the cold floor. I turn the water on. It’s cold. Now it’s warmer. Now it’s just right. Into the water. It’s steaming bliss, but there’s no time to waste. I make an inventory of the morning and the day.
Crap, I have to actually bathe. Did I even wash that? I’ll do it again. Rinse. Turn the water off. Dry myself. Put on clothes. It’s still dark out. My wife makes lunch for me 
; she is up, now, too. I grab my things. Do I have all the cords? Yes, cords. Do I have the corresponding gadgets?
My son is just waking up. I wish him good day. I kiss him on the forehead. Now a kiss for my wife as I walk out the door. The air is cold as I fast-walk to the bus stop. It’s raining. Where’s my smartphone? There it is. The bluetooth headphones aren’t working. My favorite podcast is blaring out of the speaker. Stop it. I fiddle with the device and resume the walk. Toggle the setting. No dice. I turn the thing off, then back on. I wait for it to reboot.
Waiting and walking are a great time for some pointless existential stress. Almost to the bus stop. It’s wet and loud near the main roadway. Don’t Walk. Walk. I cross the street and wait under the bus shelter. Time passes. The bus arrives, so I get on. The coat comes off.
I open the netbook, hit the button, and realize it’s been in sleep mode since yesterday. The battery is mostly drained, but there’s enough juice left to get to Seattle. I plug my smartphone into my netbook and activate data-tethering. It doesn’t work. I toggle the Android program off and then on again. Now it works. I kill my podcast and put on some unobtrusive music. The netbook is slow, the tethering is slow, but I can write. I clean up the morning’s post and hit the schedule button. I catch up on some newsfeeds.
We’ve arrived in Seattle. I put my gadgets away, turn off the music, turn on the podcast, and await my cross-street. Here we are. I step off the bus and immediately enter Seattle’s Best (much better than Starbucks). I get my coffee.
Crap, Google Listen has frozen. The podcast stops mid-sentence. I fiddle with the smartphone, the UI is sluggish as all hell (I wait two seconds between keypress and screen change). I open the task killer, kill the program, then open it back up). The podcast resumes. I walk up the hill, in the rain, six blocks to work. At least I’m getting exercise.
The Point
On bad mornings when a techno-gadget isn’t working properly, I have full-blown Office Space fantasies. I have an android-based Motorola Cliq smartphone. I did some research on things and discovered that they’re built in the deepest, darkest depths of robot hell. They were designed by a sociopathic engineer who has committed himself to madness and evil. Restrictive or not, I get why Apple fan-boys love their iShit. But that’s not really the point.
This is. Modern technology may be way keen, but they can be awfully frustrating. It’s made all the worse because they are supposed to be time-saving devices. But those time-savers, themselves, rest on a whole slew of problematic technologies. When I take account of all my daily attention-sops, these annoyances stack [like buffs].
I’m not some neo-luddite hippy, but when I reflect on the combined chain of events, I get reflective and spiritual. Maybe some meditation is in order. Ellen DeGeneres used to say that when we attend Yoga and the like, we’re really just paying for silence. 
Modernity seems to have commodified it. Silence isn’t integral; it’s a thing we buy, like mouthwash and Pringles.
The Counterpoint
I almost never go camping. But, as a child, I spent some time in tents. I had no place to rush to. I had no mental checklists. I remember waking gradually. The sun was an analog dial, turning up the light as the birds gradually came to life. Stirring into a wakened state like so is beyond bliss. No amount of phony baloney seasonal affective disorder lights can replace that.
By comparison, my morning routine is:
Daily Meditation (By Jellyvision)
Footnotes
: Like one where you’ve just inexplicably concluded a basketball game with people you haven’t seen in 20 years. Then you have to walk the four blocks back home, but get farther and farther away until you find yourself in the rain, on a darkened, muddy dirt road bordered with blackened, leafless trees. In the next instant you are home, inside, warm, though still drying off, in a darkened room in front of a computer, playing a game. Then the darkness is illuminated by lightning and you realize you are not at home, but in a rural cabin; it’s someone else’s home. In the middle distance, a rotary phone is ringing.
: She is a goddess. She knows that if *I* do it, it’ll be lame. And she manifests tasty, nutritious fare seemingly in an instant.
: “I was in yoga the other day. I was in full lotus position. My chakras were all aligned. My mind is cleared of all clatter and I’m looking out of my third eye and everything that I’m supposed to be doing. It’s amazing what comes up, when you sit in that silence. ‘Mama keeps whites bright like the sunlight, Mama’s got the magic of Clorox 2.’” – Ellen DeGeneres
