After playing the 'Gauging Your Distraction' game, I felt as though our generation is doomed due to multitasking. I  do not text and drive in reality, but this game showed me that even if I were to try to, I would not be very successful. We try to multitask everything from the moment we wake up in the morning  until we go to bed. We're all guilty of cruising Vine while brushing our teeth or trying to text in class and take notes at the same time, and these feel like little things. But all of these minute distractions throughout the day add up to a bigger problem: our attention spans are becoming shorter as we adapt to technology.

This interactive article showed me that I'm a complete mess at doing two things at once; if there was an ability to die in that game, I would've run out of lives within the first thirty seconds. So why do we expect so much from ourselves in real life? Can't we achieve one thing at a time? Maybe give it a few years to step into a few different roles instead of rushing in all at once to be everything. We're expected to be the perfect employee, daughter/son, friend, sibling, sorority or fraternity member, and the perfect college student, and we hold ourselves to these standards as well. When did we decide that it was 'not enough' to just be a few of these things for now, and grow into the rest? We expect ourselves to balance it all on the tip of a finger, and still sleep well at night and be social on the weekends. If we can't even type a short message while driving a car, how can we do all the rest of it, all at once?

Don't get me wrong: I am in full support of Generation Y aiming to be the best that it can be. I respect people pushing the envelope at work and at school to get to their dream job or to get great grades. But one can only push the envelope for so long without becoming burned out. I hope we can cut ourselves some slack. As one of my favorite quotes says:

"Don't half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing"    -Ron Swanson


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/19/technology/20090719-driving-game.html?_r=0