,Half Here, Half There: The Myth of Multitasking Culture

Let’s be honest: you’re reading this while half-doing something else. Maybe a podcast in the background. Maybe your inbox on the side. Maybe a Zoom tab you’ll flick back to in a second. Don’t feel bad — I wrote it while toggling three other windows too.

This is life now: half here, half there. We call it multitasking, but that flatters it. What we’re really doing is partitioning our brains into fragments.

Why Multitasking Was Always a Lie

Psychologists have been telling us for decades that multitasking is a myth. What we call multitasking is actually rapid context-switching. And every switch burns a little focus, erases a little memory, lowers comprehension. The brain isn’t juggling; it’s staggering.

Culture in Pieces

The scary part is how this became the cultural baseline. News headlines, memes, tragedies, sandwich reviews — all lined up in the same resolution. Each gets its flicker of attention before being displaced by the next. The feed doesn’t discriminate; it just wants you moving.

So we experience culture in pieces, never as a whole. We feel informed but hollow. Busy but not grounded. Connected but never really present.

Why We Applaud It Anyway

Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves this fragmentation is productivity. You’re “efficient” because you replied to emails while doomscrolling, right? Except what you really did was dilute both. Multitasking culture isn’t a flex. It’s a crash.

The Cost of Half-Life

The real loss isn’t just individual burnout. It’s cultural erosion. When everything is consumed in fragments, nothing develops weight. Outrage, empathy, even joy — they all skim the surface and vanish. We’ve built an internet that mistakes flicker for engagement.

Partial presence isn’t a quirk. It’s the condition of digital life. And the longer we pretend it’s sustainable, the more we normalize being nowhere, even when we’re everywhere.