4 - Jet Fighters Over North Vietnam: Turning Off The Switches

In 1965, the U.S. got heavily involved in a proxy war in a country called Vietnam. The how, what, and why are immaterial for this book. There was one part of this war that has serious relevance to the Digital World. 
The U.S military believes in the importance of pilot survival in its combat aircraft. To enhance the probabilities of survival, combat pilots had (and still have) long, intense, training programs. In addition, gadgets were designed to help the pilot find out about dangerous situations before it was too late. Radar tracking warning systems, missile launch warnings systems, airspeed, altitude, fuel warning systems, all sorts of warning systems. A major part of the training was how to recognize and react to the warnings from all the various warning systems. The U.S. military felt that these systems would make the American pilot victorious in air combat, even though they added weight and reduced the performance of the aircraft. But until 1965, they had not been tried in actual combat. When the Vietnam War fired up, the senior military planners knew they would get a chance to see how great their new bells and whistle actually work in combat...
The first trials came over North Vietnam. It had hand-me-down Soviet air defenses, but that included some obsolete jet fighters, radar guided anti-aircraft missiles, and old fashion guns. 
"Piece of cake", the American military planners thought, and so they started sending attack waves into North Vietnam. They figured they could bomb at will.
Then they started to get the reports back from the first raids....

They were losing planes and pilots, left and right. This wasn't supposed to happen! American technology was supreme; how could these third rate defenses be so effective? Obviously, we're just not planning the raids right. And so it went until early 1968, when the American halted raids over North Vietnam. With no more raids, the U.S. planners could spend to time to analyze just what happened over North Vietnam. What they found directly impact you, today and tomorrow...

What they found was when the pilots need the information the most, because things were happening so fast, the pilots were freezing up! The human mind could only handle so much information. And when it got too much at the same time, it just froze up and did nothing. Flying a high-speed airplane, doing fancy maneuvers, with six different bells and whistles going off, the human mind just ignored what it couldn't handle. So the Surface To Air missile warning system worked perfectly, but the pilot was so busy he didn't hear it, and got shot down.
Some pilots though, seemed to do well in these raids, hitting their targets and even shooting down some of the obsolete aircraft, and coming home intact, raid after raid. Aha! The military planners thought, it takes a particular type of person to do well in the modern air combat. Let's intensely interview the few who did well and learn how to select the people who can handle the environment. 
They got the shock of their lives. The successful pilots 'fess up. They were mavericks who didn't like all the bells and whistles they'd been forced to use. So every time they went into enemy airspace, they disobeyed orders and turned off all the bells and whistles; and flew by the seat of their pants. They didn't tell anyone, because if they got found out, they might be court-martialed. It was referred to by most of the pilots as "turning off the switches". So they didn't go into sensory overload, and stayed alive.
This caused the American military to totally revise the uses of their bells and whistles, and to retrain their pilots in more seat of the pants flying skills. When the bombing of North Vietnam resumed in 1972, the American planes and pilots showed a 10 fold increase in effectiveness and survivability, despite flying the same equipment into a vastly more intense set of air defenses that had been built in the bombing lull.

What does this have to do with you?
Are you turning off the switches?
Why should you turn off the switches? There's so much entertainment to enjoy nowadays. You don't want to miss any of it...
Yes, indeed. Let's start adding up what's available. 
Hollywood admits to over 100,000 talking movies in their vaults. If you watched movies 16 hours a day, (using the other eight hours to eat, sleep, and bathe) it would take you 25 years to see them all, once. TV shows? Say 40 years, at 3 hours a night, times 3 channels on average, (oops make that 5 channels, and combine American and British television shows for viewing), times 22 new shows a year, equals...16 years to see all the television shows at 16 hours a day. And that's not including all the US soap operas and games shows over the years, which would probably triple that number. Recorded music? There’s at least a million discreet pieces of music recorded at various times in the last 80 years. So 1,000,000 times 3 minutes at 16 hours a day works out to 8 years to hear it all once. Books? Oh my! Who knows how many books have been written in the last 300 years. The books controlled by the big publishers, and the books from Project Gutenberg as of January 2009, easily exceed 100 thousand books. If you figure 3 hours a book, you get about 51 years of reading. And there's sporting events, concerts, video games, card and board games...... (Oh my God, I've left out the 3,000 or so old radio comedy and drama shows! Yipes! News and Newspapers! And casinos and stock charts...) 
Just in the items I've measured, it would take 25 years (movies) + 16 years (TV) + 8 years (recorded music) + 50+ years for english language books = 100 years of entertainment, at 16 hours a day, 365 days a year. And that is a conservative estimate, ever of the entertainments listed. And the pile keeps growing every day.
How long do you plan to live? Let me tell you, it's not long enough.
So the typical American is now flirting with sensory overload all the time. Reading snatches of a book during the commercials of a TV show, or driving a car, listening to music, while talking on a cell phone, or.....
All this multitasking is a vain attempt to keep on top of the flood of entertainment out there today, which can't be done. All you can do is prioritize what you want to accomplish with the time available. And to truly enjoy what you're doing, you need to concentrate on it. And that means you have to leave things out. Lot's of thing out. There's no other choice. I've accepted that I can only read so many books, see so many movies, listen to so much music. And I know that there will be entertainment that I would have love to experienced, but I didn't have the time to experience it. I've started flipping off the switches, to enjoy life better, even if it is more limited.

So.... When will you start turning off the switches.....