Humans don't scale

Hugh is feeling like I do - on fire and trying to keep up with the high pace of life on and off the internet.

"human attention does not obey moore's law"

My life is pretty much divided cleanly into two parts. 1. The day job i.e. Stormhoek. 2. Everything else i.e. gapingvoid. Both are getting busier. And busier. Both have aspects to them which are not complimentary. Both often pull me in opposite directions. Yet at the same time, neither could exist without the other. So a lot of the time these days I am feeling, to paraphrase Tolkein's Bilbo Baggins, "like too little butter spread over too much toast."

As Tim Ferris points out in his great new book, "The 4-Hour Workweek", we web workers of the world have three main currencies to trade with: Time, Mobility and Money. The latter two I am fine with. Time, however, is starting to do my head in...

I had pretty much the same conversation with Mike Arrington, when he was in town a few months ago. As successful as his Techcrunch brand was becoming at the time [and still is], you could tell he was feeling the strain. Actually, he was pretty open about it. He was basically having the same rant as I am having now.

And now I'm starting to think, hey, pretty much everybody I know who's successful in this space is having the same problem, to greater or lesser degrees. Something has taken over our lives and it ain't all beer and skittles.

Of course, this web-enabled, stressed-out success model isn't anything new. Since the dawn of time, to get anything interesting done in this world pretty much requires one kissing normal life good-bye. This sudden mass overload of input we're constantly experiencing is just one more manifestation of doing exactly that. One of many. Same as it ever was.

[Rant over.]

My goal is to recruit someone else so I can step back and breathe. It's important. And I think I might be close.

Elsewhere what solutions might such internet stress-heads need in the future to make them feel better? It's not a rhetorical question.