The Price of Parallelism

I am currently in a Zoom meeting with 15 other people, responding to a Slack thread about a project that died in 2025, and trying to format a spreadsheet where the margins refuse to cooperate. My heart is thumping at 85 beats per minute, not because I am excited, but because I am performing a cognitive heist on my own brain. I am stealing focus from my present self to pay a debt to a future self that is already overdrawn.

It wasn’t the connection. It was the fact that I was trying to exist in three places at once and, as a result, I existed nowhere. I am a victim of the pernicious myth of the good multitasker, a lie we tell ourselves to justify the shallowing of our souls.

The Deep Gaze of Constraint

I realized the depth of this failure yesterday. I was having a conversation with a colleague about something that actually mattered-the future of our department-and I yawned. It wasn’t a yawn of boredom; it was a yawn of total system exhaustion.

In the world of prison education, this kind of fragmentation is almost impossible, which is why the work of Hiroshi K.-H. is so jarringly relevant to our frantic lives. As a prison education coordinator, Hiroshi works in an environment where the ‘luxury’ of digital distraction is stripped away. His students, 35 men in faded jumpsuits, have no smartphones. When they sit down to learn, they are forced into the singular, uncomfortable act of focus.

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He described one student who spent 65 minutes just trying to read a single page of a philosophy text. The man kept looking up, his eyes searching for a notification that wasn’t there, his hands twitching for a device that had been confiscated years ago.

But after 15 weeks of this forced monasticism, something changed. The men began to develop what Hiroshi calls ‘the deep gaze.’ They were becoming more human by becoming less ‘efficient.’ It makes me wonder if our offices are just differently flavored cells, where the bars are made of glowing pixels and the warden is an algorithm demanding 105 percent of our bandwidth.

Industrial Hangover on the Mind

We are living through an industrial hangover. In the 1905 era, we optimized the factory floor by making humans act like machines. We measured output in units per hour. Now, in the knowledge economy, we’ve applied the same logic to the mind.

The Ripple Effect of Errors

Rebellion Through Single-Tasking

I think back to the ritual of the cigar, something that feels increasingly like an act of rebellion in an age of micro-transactions of attention. To smoke a fine cigar is to enter into a contract with time. You cannot rush it; if you do, the temperature rises, the oils scorch, and the flavor is ruined. It demands a single-tasking soul.

When you sit down at a place like havanacigarhouse, you are essentially checking your frantic self at the door. You are committing to a 65-minute window where the only thing that matters is the draw, the ash, and the conversation that happens when people aren’t looking at their laps.

This internal monologue-the flicker between the spreadsheet, dinner, and calling my mother-is the sound of a brain grinding its gears because it hasn’t been oiled with the silence of focus in years.

The Revolutionary Act of Being Present

We need to stop praising the multitasker and start pitying them. They are the ones missing the nuances of life. They are the ones who will wake up in 25 years and realize they have a million memories of screens and very few memories of faces.

We must reclaim the right to be singular. The most revolutionary thing you can do in a society that demands you be everywhere is to stay exactly where you are.