> Among the resources that have been plundered by modern technology, the ruins of our attention have commanded a lot of attention. We can’t focus anymore. Getting any “deep work” done requires formidable willpower or a broken modem. Reading has degenerated into skimming and scrolling. The only real way out is to adopt a meditation practice and cultivate a monkish existence.
> But in actual historical fact, a life of prayer and seclusion has never meant a life without distraction.
I don't think anyone serious claims "distraction" is a new phenomena that didn't exist before "screens." The actual claim is more like the magnitude of distraction is higher now.
To give a slightly different example: complaining that your memory is poor because you can only memorize 100 poems is very different than complaining your memory is poor because you can't memorize 10 lines, even though they're both "complaints about memory." Unfortunately, a lot of people engage with these comparisons without looking at the actual details and differences, so they say useless things (often with the effect of denying a problem).
Previous societies never required that 80% of the working population be scribes.
Being a scribe is hard. It was an unusual ability to such an extent that it reinforced the medieval notion of a "vocation" (a calling or duty to do this work).
Now we require every worker who wants to rise above the level of retail sales to be capable of spending hours a day going down columns of detailed textual data in Excel or Airtables, or managing a queue of e-mails, or smoothly transitioning between inventory and maintenance.
It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction.
We're being forced by the labor market to pretend that we aren't chimpanzees.
> It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction.
Clearly both?
Processing dry material on a screen, that also offers endlessly seductive doom scrolling opportunities?
Sandwiched productivity & entertaining unproductively closer than its ever been!
It would be like a scribe trying to copy an endless and far too familiar religious text, while avoiding the pull of the odd pages, which all depict explicit colorful animated scenes of delicious sin.
It's funny, I deliberately used "less that X, more that Y" to underline that both factors contribute instead of saying "it's not that X, it is that Y."
I'm sympathetic to your response but I don't think that very many people are ignoring their work for fancy, high-impact content because high-impact content remains taboo.
Distracted people are mostly not watching TikTok, which is an obviously fireable offense.
They are mostly, as always, staring at the wood-grain on their desk for the two seconds it takes to forget which part of the TPS form they were entering.
As Spongebob said "I can't write with all these eraser shavings all over my paper! Now they're floating in my thinking space!"
It's like the garden of Eden, but every other tree is the kind you're not supposed to eat from. And they have nicer fruit!
I think were are characterizing this problem well. Now how do we monetize this? Let people outsource discipline, which we provide, but in a gamified, low customer effort way? I see enterprise potential.
I think it is reasonable to assert both that distraction has been a problem for hundreds of years and that it is considerably worse now than it had been.
Thing is, me personally I used to be a better “scribe”.
Meaning I did know how to be a good enough “scribe”, but lately I feel like I’m doing a poorer and poorer job when it comes to getting it done. And most of it is related to the ability of focusing on the job at hand, or, to be more exact, to the decreasing ability of doing it.
It could be that I’m getting older (I’m in my early 40s), could be related to post-Covid effects (as pretty much all of us have have Covid at least once), could be that with “experience” (i.e. with getting older) I’ve begun to realize that it is not worth it to do certain things the way I did them before, I can’t really tell which is which, but the difference with before is there.
And, importantly, technology today is expressly designed, with legions of extremely smart PhDs building in instantaneous feedback loops, to keep you as addicted as possible. And these experts' job performance is specifically rated on how good they are at addicting you.
Therefore, the people who confidently proclaim that this new level of distraction-engineering is the no different from the distractions of a previous era probably have something to gain from from your hijacked attention. Maybe a bonus at work for coding it into an app to such a successful degree.
According to Hosfstader, Lakoff and others, metaphor is the core of cognition, the basic algorithm upon which all else runs. It is deeply embedded in the way we perceive the world, and this is reflected in our language; Lakoff catalogued some of the "metaphors we live by" in his book of the same name, and it is surprising how transparently we use metaphor all the time without even being aware of it.
As an intuition pump, consider the following vaguely associated words and their antonyms:
up / good / positive / forwards / fast / white / on / daytime / hot / red / aroused / friendly
down / bad / negative / backwards / slow / black / off / nighttime / cold / blue / bored / indifferent
I'm sure you can add more. You can pick almost any pair of these words and find a phrase that relates them - "I'm feeling blue because Claire called off our date; she's been cold ever since Dave bad-mouthed her."
Interesting, that book caused me to question what I really know and hold my views on metaphore. When you see slime mold "learning" and decent AI emerging, it really starts to throw a wet towel on how amazing we think humans are in general because of our intelligence. Then there's election night.
Sorry, I just read your comment. That teacher just said it like "very often", not that is like a rule that every comparison is a bad argument, but more often than not we tend to go the way of comparisons (think about whataboutism for example)
It's a phrase transition or threshold effect. The constant, lag, effort, "cost" free stimulation is indeed different. I have to manage my mood through sports and or fasting to hope my brain can sustain more than 10 min of calm reading.
I still have "open tab" reflexes anytime I get next to my laptop and my eyes shift left regularly just as-if there were some google news side bar stream coming.
There’s quite a bit of data. The early chapters of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari provides a good overview of the research, which shows that people are increasingly switching their attention from one thing to another (both in longitudinal research studies and by analyzing things like how long topics trend in the news). He then goes on to summarize research that shows how “intelligence” drops when people switch focus too quickly. Eg speed reading drops retention, multitasking reduces IQ, etc.
You responded to the second sentence, not the first.
"The early chapters of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari provides a good overview of the research, which shows that people are increasingly switching their attention from one thing to another"
> What they discovered is there is one mechanism that can make this happen every time. You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
I'm sure this question is coming from an earnest place, but does it not stand to reason that the sheer amount of information we have almost ubiquitous access to, combined with personalized content recommendation, means that we are more distracted than a medieval person who had no exposure to such things? How would one even try to assert this empirically?
A medieval person also didn't go through school, likely wasn't taught how to read or forced to work through math problems and do almost 20 years of schooling with the intention of improving their thinking skills, analytical skills, memory and attention.
So it is not obvious at all which effects dominate and if this isn't just the same drivel that Gessner spouted in the 1500's about how books and the printing press were going to create an information overload and ruin our attention
Given how popular TikTok and short form content is with the younger generations who are currently in school or just graduated from 20 something years of schooling, I don't think all that intention of improving their "thinking skills, analytical skills, memory and attention" is that effective at countering contemporary distractions. Have you seen the latest trend where Gen Z'ers zone out by watching a TikTok that has a family guy clip, some arts and crafts clip, and some gameplay footage all on the same screen? It is the epitome of distraction and it's catching on like wildfire because people watching these switch between each subject on screen just enough to hold their attention. The algorithm is rewarding that, so more and more TikToks have composite videos.
Going back to the subject of contemporary education, one could also speculate that ~20 years of schooling replacing ~20 years of apprenticeship and mastery of a single craft makes the ability to resist distraction worse. Perhaps teaching someone to make wagon wheels for 20 years makes them better able to focus on a single thing than teaching them to learn all sorts of different subjects for a few hours each day?
People like to look back at previous generation's moral panics, but I can't help but think there was an element of truth to many of them.
> People like to look back at previous generation's moral panics, but I can't help but think there was an element of truth to many of them.
What is the element of truth then? What was the negative impact of the printing press and how did it end society and our ability to pay attention to things?
It's so strange to have someone hear that their concern has existed for hundreds of years, the doom and gloom never materialized, and yet still double down on the same thing. What besides your intuition or the fact you share the same fear actually would lead you to think that this time it's different and tiktok is the technology that'll ruin us?
I mean, didn't it for some people? The church lost their ability to be the sole source of the bible once printing presses started churning out books. So the church lost a significant aspect of their influence on the public.
In effect when there are people screaming about societal changes it typically means they stand to lose some position of power they currently hold because of it.
You're introducing unrelated things. This thread is about human's attention span, ability to focus and memorize due to how we consume media as new technologies are developed.
It's not about a technology being able to displace power away from a specific organization or not. That's not an argument anyone was making here.
>"What was the negative impact of the printing press and how did it end society and our ability to pay attention to things?"
That's quite a leap from what I said. I took the stance that there is an element of truth, or at the very least a valid concern. Not that the printing press was going to end society. The tone of the linked article is definitely dismissive, something akin to "why be concerned, look at all these similar panics. We're doing just fine."
>"His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press."
This is exactly what happened. The printing press was fundamental to the Catholic/Protestant schism, enabled political pamphleteering, and is what caused newspapers to come into existence. Yes, society survived this, but the concern was no doubt real and realized. As for "the doom and gloom never materialized", what is fake news and misinformation but an unmanageable flood of information?
>"or the fact you share the same fear actually would lead you to think that this time it's different and tiktok is the technology that'll ruin us?"
You're putting words in my mouth. I do not think TikTok is going to ruin society, but I do believe it is having a negative effect on many individuals within it. You had mentioned "doubling down on the same thing", but I think that is misplaced. Superficially the concern is the same, but the cause is different. There hasn't been anything like TikTok and algorithmic recommendation in the history of civilization, so it would be wrong to dismissively assume the panic will pass and concerns about its effects are unfounded and unwarranted because that's what happened with books, radio, television, and so on.
> For some reason they seem to think it will work when the book is electronic and small enough.
Do you mean a stationary exercise bike?
I don't read books on those because I am usually sweating and I don't want to get that on the book. Also, most paperbacks are pretty springy, so sometimes I need to have one hand holding them open, or some kind of clip system on the bike.
iPads or Kindles don't have these problems, so I can certainly imagine using them instead. I don't, probably because of an irrational aversion to getting anything from the grungy gym on my personal devices.
When the weather gets nice in nyc, the bike lanes fill up with people slowly meandering about the lane as they cycle one-handed, eyes glued to their cellphones.
My unscientific, purely vibes based take is that the ubiquity of the smartphone has created such widespread severe dopamine addiction that basic human judgment and even self preservation instinct is increasingly impaired.
Well, once when I was out walking, I saw someone peeing on a trail side, dick in one hand, phone in the other. There is a social crisis of some sort and we basically have no idea how to get out of it.
No no, actual bicycles. The Netherlands, famous for having 1.3 bicycles per capita [1], has implemented a law intended to prevent mobile phone use on very non-stationary, moving bicycles [2].
An exhortation to consider effect sizes is different to a claim about the effect sizes in a specific situation. It could be that OP is doing both, but you appear to be neglecting the former.
Bet they'd have been more distracted if you held a no-expense-spared carnival with entertainers and games and sports of all sorts and intellectuals and blow-hards from all over the world gathered in and around their monastery, whooping it up and putting on plays, shows (some of them... gasp, sex shows!), speeches, round-tables, demonstrations, et c., 24/7, non-stop.
That's what every place is like, now, with always-on available-everywhere Internet. Any of us can switch from whatever we're doing, to paying attention to the carnival, in about two seconds flat, anywhere, any time—and that's when the carnival's not actively bugging us to come take a look. It's always right there, tempting us.
That is a significant part of it, but there's more to the problem.
Consider the simple task of looking up the definition of a word that you've been pondering. In pre-internet times, you'd physically have to move your body toward a specific room and seek a specific book. There may be a carnival, but even if you look that way and get distracted, you can reorient yourself and refocus on your goal by simply assessing your physical positioning and posture in space. "Ah yes, I am standing in this hallway facing east because that's where the library is."
On your phone, you pull it out of your pocket and unlock it. Probably the unlocking is not distracting on its own, but it's also quite possible that you've got some "useful" information on your lockscreen which can distract you immediately. Bad start, but let's pretend it doesn't happen.
Ok, now you're on your phone. There's a bunch of different apps, many of them actively trying to capture your attention - carnival-goers calling out to you to look at their show. Alright, distraction achieved - now tear yourself away and get back to your task. What was that task again? You see a bunch of apps, and you're curious about what's in them. And it would only take seconds to get a little bit of value from any of them - news, uplifting stories, comedy, whatever. Can context help? You're in the same place physically and emotionally that you are for most of your life, on your couch (or maybe in front of your actual computer). Nothing is different from the times when you are actually intentionally opening those apps. Oh well, it will come to you, just pass some time at the carnival...
The choices we make can be divided into creation and consumption. The more you can push yourself to create, the more power you'll wield. If you can control what you consume, it'll make you a better creator.
Easily available distraction raises the activation energy of your would-be competitors. If you can avoid the distraction yourself, you can get ahead.
A twisted way of looking at it, but it has some truth.
The difference between a medieval monk and a smartphone-wielding modern is that the former had fewer options for dopamine-generating distractions, while we have a limitless supply in our pocket. At a certain point the monk might be so bored that a treatise by Avicenna might actually be preferable to doing nothing at all, and that is no small inducement to deep progress, the processing of emotions, and contemplation more generally.
Avicenna apparently had a very strict schedule of putting down the quill and enjoying the company of his women. So now, the fact of his genius notwithstanding, what does that do with the dopamine and distraction theorem given this man was unbelievably productive in his life?
I've also seen it suggested that modern tech is causing people today to be less in touch with their physical bodies and the bodies of those around them. I personally think I'm much happier and more "productive" when I have access to physical intimacy (which, as with perhaps many people today, is less often than I would prefer). Perhaps it's all related?
Add the discipline bit (which he had in spades) and I think you may have something there. I'm struggling a bit thinking of the correct word here; satisfaction and contentment come to mind, as well as un-settled mind when dissatisfied.
It all seems to boil down to the mind, and where you stand on the mind-body (none?) issue. These days I'm tending to be far more accepting of the unified view that dispenses with the duality.
The un-settled mind is prone to distraction, naturally.
I would not consider a scheduled physical/social/emotional activity to be a distraction. Is eating lunch a distraction? Is sleeping a distraction? If anything, I think Avicenna supports the value of reducing distraction.
> Avicenna apparently had a very strict schedule of putting down the quill and enjoying the company of his women. So now, the fact of his genius notwithstanding, what does that do with the dopamine and distraction theorem given this man was unbelievably productive in his life?
Probably not much. I forget the exact term, but when people refer to "dopamine" in the contact of distraction, they're not really talking about dopamine in general, but rather things like slot-machine-like random enforcement engagement mechanisms (which can be explicitly designed, like in social media apps, or accidentally "fall out" of new tech-enabled activities).
I'm not sure they're mutually exclusive categories. A friend became a monk and I've visited several times, some of the monks have and use smartphones.
Modern monks at least have almost no unstructured time, or freedom to select a new task merely because they're tired of the current one. I don't know if this is how medieval monks lived but I suspect it wasn't that different.
So I suspect boredom in its usual sense is not part of the experience, because "nothing at all" isn't an activity that they do. Almost their entire long day is specifically allocated to focused tasks. I'm sure their minds wander during prayer and attention flags during routine toil. But they have no freedom to choose something else, and so never get to do something like read a book "out of boredom."
I experienced one of those strict Vipassana retreat for 10 days where most of the distraction you take for granted in today's life are forbidden: no reading, no talking, no phone, no internet, no physical contact in the premises and no contact from people outside. It's the closest it can be to a life's monk.
Your day is clearly structured, essentially waking up at 4am, meditating, doing some simple tasks, meditating, eating, meditating, eating, meditating, sleeping. If you play the game (which I did), you literally spend 10h/day meditating.
In a sense "boredom" just becomes an experience by itself which paradoxically isn't boring anymore.
As it's been noticed here, surely monks were not distracted by the same technology and at the same scale we are distracted to in today's world. When I came back to the "real world" from this experience, I could realise how much one life's was just constantly distracted.
I have been around monks and spent extended stretches of time at Orthodox Christian monasteries, and I'd like to clarify a couple of things: monks can and do get distracted and they can, indeed, just leave their cell and go outside if they want to. There is a passion called "acedia" that attacks every monk to a greater or lesser degree. Acedia is the "spirit of noonday". It's distraction. It's the desire to do anything else except whatever it is you're doing (especially prayer). It's the desire to be somewhere else or to do something else. It can take the form of gluttony, or the form of going to talk to another monk, or the form of just going for a walk instead of praying.
Also, monks are praying the whole time. All the time. They are usually repeating a short prayer in their minds while they work, while they walk, while they eat. All the time. Of course, they get distracted and their minds wander (especially the newer monks), but the aspiration is to "pray continually". They aren't just letting their minds wander around and think about whatever they want. A lot of their effort and attention goes into constantly guarding their minds against distracting thoughts and re-focusing on prayer.
Monks (Orthodox Christian monks, anyway) do, indeed, have freedom to choose something else, but the whole point of their ascetic struggle is to ignore those impulses and to stay in prayer.
The argument of humanity living a perpetual zombie state is hard to buy into when comparing the past and present. Especially when comparing monks who arguably have dedicated much of their life to awareness.
The differences of “distractions” are what matters here. Being distracted with god, your body, your emotions, or your mind is a human condition. Being distracted with artificial things is another.
Monks have extensive memories. Contemporary man has the memory of a goldfish. Two completely different ways the brain can work if given the right amount of stress and daily practice.
Much research has shown that those who meditate regularly have built a deliberate skill to focus their attention where needed. Many people struggle to do even that as modern attention is much more scattered between artificial distractions.
Is memory even that useful anymore? Now that we are all literate and can offload our knowledge to our devices, perhaps the ability to keep that written information organized and having systems is a more useful skill than being able to recall the information directly from your head.
Which is why they invented clocks, to remind them to focus on
prayer. Unfortunately however, their clock towers inadvertently caused
the break from solar/biological time to artificial "time-keeping" and
via John Harrison's marine chronometer to imperial adventure, plunder
and modernity that buried God in the "tombs and sepulchres" of His
dead churches.
My first thought is that the distractions on your smartphone are more vapid and and they keep you from noticing the real world around you. The equivalent I can recall was reading books on the NYC subway on the way to High School or home. The book was chosen by me and did not beep or vibrate while in my pocket, and I was still aware of my surroundings. I'll take old school distractions any day. Phones vibrating and beeping are Pavlovian, and we are the dogs in the system.
Edit: I find reading HN like picking up the newspaper. I appreciate the simple layout, but I can make a comment and be active if I choose.
You have the choice. My phone is always in fully silent mode. I choose when I get updates from it.
Only a few people are on an emergency list that make the phone ring and they know not to bother me for mundane things.
You have to be really educated and be aware of the potential risks of losing your attention via the phone. Most of the people just rely on it to not think about stuff or to not think about problems, and maybe for them it's not a choice.
First I want to take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite books as of late: "Sayings of the desert fathers". It is a collection of writings from very early Christian monks (around 200AD): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140447318/. Cannot recommend this enough.
And here is a famous quote from Saint Anthony: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.”
This is relevant because a lot of the things in this book have to do with removing distractions. The monks were doing it to pray.
Okay that said:
Something I've been noticing about myself lately, which could just be reading comprehension decline?
I tend to skim what people write heavily. So much of what people write seems completely pointless. ChatGPT and other LLMs have really laid this bare. You can take a simple statement like "tell this person that I can't make it to dinner", and it will expand it into several paragraphs of niceties, but the actual information is the same.
I've noticed that it makes it difficult to switch back to information-dense reading, and to actually read all of it instead of reflexively skimming it to try and glean out the seed.
> I've noticed that it makes it difficult to switch back to information-dense reading, and to actually read all of it instead of reflexively skimming it to try and glean out the seed.
Keeping on the religious theme I've noticed this with the Psalms, even before considering the GPT stuff. I think I grew up taught to be over-dismissive of many types of poetry. I always had an impression that it was mostly just silly space-filling pseduo-deep reused imagery and repetition. School didn't help dissuade me of this.
For me, I think the thing to overcome is to focus on the value of a sense of respect for the author and the work unto itself, rather than just valuing the "understanding" you get from the text (which will always be shaped by preconceptions). A sense of awe (maybe at divine inspiration, maybe at near-divine genius, or maybe just at the sacrifice of time and life-force an ordinary person gave up to create something). For the example of the Psalms, I have noticed that despite finding the language clunky at first, they have a certain way of sticking in your head that prose does not.
A strategy I've been focusing on recently is giving myself permission to reread (and maybe memorize) important/enjoyable works. Reading something twice is basically the opposite of skimming, or a way to counteract skimming. There probably is such a thing as rereading something more than it deserves (I reread Calvin and Hobbes for the zillionth time recently, which I still deeply enjoy but now it's more of a way to relax my mind before bed than a source of insight) but there are certainly works that do deserve it [1].
Anyway, something I've been thinking about a lot as well and I agree that it's fascinating to consider how fundamental is it to the human condition that monks have been struggling with it for millennia. The book recommendation is appreciated.
tl;dr, but here's the difference: we willingly purchase devices that are sworn servants of entities who profit from grabbing our attention, engagement, and cash.
I doubt that you can say a monk, who may be distrated by flies buzzing, or cows mooing, or his brothers' quills scratching at vellum, is on the same plane of distraction as someone who's jacked in to the Cybernet at all times.
There's an interdependence and reliance on these distraction factories, now, where people have given over functions to their phone: such as wallet, notebook, any and all communications with loved ones (especially in the post-C19, increasingly isolated urban wastelands.) If we can't live without our phones, and we rely on our phones for the minimum functions of life, what does that say for their ability to distract us?
Monks who are good at prayer are good at managing distractions. You don't simply "shut them out" or shun them. You roll with them like a reed swaying in the wind. I have practiced a tiny bit of Centering Prayer (see also, Hesychasm or Mindfulness). It is marvellous. I simply wish I could do it every day and live a lifestyle that's centered on Christ. Needs lots of devotion and practice. It won't reduce my distractions or ruminations, but it will help me become the master of my own thoughts.
I asked ChatGPT 4 to tell me from that article the key actionable takeaways people can apply to their daily lives. I'm sleep deprived and prefer that to reading a long-winded article. Here's the response:
"Firstly, it highlights the importance of daydreaming and mind-wandering as a way to promote creativity, problem-solving, and self-reflection. Readers are encouraged to carve out time in their schedules for these activities, rather than dismissing them as distractions.
Secondly, the review emphasizes the importance of boredom in stimulating creativity and the generation of new ideas. It suggests that people should embrace boredom and resist the urge to fill every moment of their day with stimulation, as this can stifle creative thinking.
Thirdly, the book review discusses the potential benefits of practices such as meditation, mindfulness, and journaling in promoting self-reflection and reducing stress. It suggests that these practices can help people to better understand their own thought processes and cultivate a greater sense of well-being.
Finally, the review highlights the role of technology in shaping our attentional habits and urges readers to be mindful of their use of technology. It suggests that people should be intentional about their use of technology and take steps to reduce distractions and increase focus, such as turning off notifications and limiting screen time.
Overall, the book review provides actionable takeaways that readers can apply to their daily lives, such as prioritizing daydreaming and mind-wandering, embracing boredom, practicing mindfulness and journaling, and being intentional about technology use."
As a young adult who constantly finds themself glued to their phone for much too long, I can relate to the distraction-epidemic. Does anyone know of any good solutions out there for helping curb the "addiction" to screens a bit?
I wonder why humans have been concerned with being distracted for so long. And I think we can wonder about it without refuting social networks can be (though not always) bad for you.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230322140015/https://www.nytime...
https://archive.ph/QMJHA
> Among the resources that have been plundered by modern technology, the ruins of our attention have commanded a lot of attention. We can’t focus anymore. Getting any “deep work” done requires formidable willpower or a broken modem. Reading has degenerated into skimming and scrolling. The only real way out is to adopt a meditation practice and cultivate a monkish existence.
> But in actual historical fact, a life of prayer and seclusion has never meant a life without distraction.
I don't think anyone serious claims "distraction" is a new phenomena that didn't exist before "screens." The actual claim is more like the magnitude of distraction is higher now.
To give a slightly different example: complaining that your memory is poor because you can only memorize 100 poems is very different than complaining your memory is poor because you can't memorize 10 lines, even though they're both "complaints about memory." Unfortunately, a lot of people engage with these comparisons without looking at the actual details and differences, so they say useless things (often with the effect of denying a problem).
Previous societies never required that 80% of the working population be scribes.
Being a scribe is hard. It was an unusual ability to such an extent that it reinforced the medieval notion of a "vocation" (a calling or duty to do this work).
Now we require every worker who wants to rise above the level of retail sales to be capable of spending hours a day going down columns of detailed textual data in Excel or Airtables, or managing a queue of e-mails, or smoothly transitioning between inventory and maintenance.
It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction.
We're being forced by the labor market to pretend that we aren't chimpanzees.
> It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction.
Clearly both?
Processing dry material on a screen, that also offers endlessly seductive doom scrolling opportunities?
Sandwiched productivity & entertaining unproductively closer than its ever been!
It would be like a scribe trying to copy an endless and far too familiar religious text, while avoiding the pull of the odd pages, which all depict explicit colorful animated scenes of delicious sin.
It's funny, I deliberately used "less that X, more that Y" to underline that both factors contribute instead of saying "it's not that X, it is that Y."
I'm sympathetic to your response but I don't think that very many people are ignoring their work for fancy, high-impact content because high-impact content remains taboo.
Distracted people are mostly not watching TikTok, which is an obviously fireable offense.
They are mostly, as always, staring at the wood-grain on their desk for the two seconds it takes to forget which part of the TPS form they were entering.
As Spongebob said "I can't write with all these eraser shavings all over my paper! Now they're floating in my thinking space!"
That is a great analogy! Technology is this wonderful book, so is it reasonable to expect that we won't read half of it?
Exactly!
It's like the garden of Eden, but every other tree is the kind you're not supposed to eat from. And they have nicer fruit!
I think were are characterizing this problem well. Now how do we monetize this? Let people outsource discipline, which we provide, but in a gamified, low customer effort way? I see enterprise potential.
I don’t think ”clearly both” makes sense when comparing two things. Perhaps you are making a straw man of the parent comment?
I think it is reasonable to assert both that distraction has been a problem for hundreds of years and that it is considerably worse now than it had been.
Thing is, me personally I used to be a better “scribe”.
Meaning I did know how to be a good enough “scribe”, but lately I feel like I’m doing a poorer and poorer job when it comes to getting it done. And most of it is related to the ability of focusing on the job at hand, or, to be more exact, to the decreasing ability of doing it.
It could be that I’m getting older (I’m in my early 40s), could be related to post-Covid effects (as pretty much all of us have have Covid at least once), could be that with “experience” (i.e. with getting older) I’ve begun to realize that it is not worth it to do certain things the way I did them before, I can’t really tell which is which, but the difference with before is there.
And, importantly, technology today is expressly designed, with legions of extremely smart PhDs building in instantaneous feedback loops, to keep you as addicted as possible. And these experts' job performance is specifically rated on how good they are at addicting you.
Therefore, the people who confidently proclaim that this new level of distraction-engineering is the no different from the distractions of a previous era probably have something to gain from from your hijacked attention. Maybe a bonus at work for coding it into an app to such a successful degree.
In highschool, a teacher told me that 'comparisions are usually bad arguments', and that shit stuck with me for a long time.
Um, I mean is it even true? Did they offer any insight on why this is the case?
Comparing a new thing to an old familiar thing or a current fact can really help people overcome irrational bias against the fear of the unknown.
Metaphors, similes, and analogies are all comparisons and all recognized as powerful forms of rhetoric.
"Metaphors, similes, and analogies.." all of which are seductive and cause us to think we know more than we really do.
According to Hosfstader, Lakoff and others, metaphor is the core of cognition, the basic algorithm upon which all else runs. It is deeply embedded in the way we perceive the world, and this is reflected in our language; Lakoff catalogued some of the "metaphors we live by" in his book of the same name, and it is surprising how transparently we use metaphor all the time without even being aware of it.
As an intuition pump, consider the following vaguely associated words and their antonyms:
up / good / positive / forwards / fast / white / on / daytime / hot / red / aroused / friendly
down / bad / negative / backwards / slow / black / off / nighttime / cold / blue / bored / indifferent
I'm sure you can add more. You can pick almost any pair of these words and find a phrase that relates them - "I'm feeling blue because Claire called off our date; she's been cold ever since Dave bad-mouthed her."
Interesting, that book caused me to question what I really know and hold my views on metaphore. When you see slime mold "learning" and decent AI emerging, it really starts to throw a wet towel on how amazing we think humans are in general because of our intelligence. Then there's election night.
Sorry, I just read your comment. That teacher just said it like "very often", not that is like a rule that every comparison is a bad argument, but more often than not we tend to go the way of comparisons (think about whataboutism for example)
It's a phrase transition or threshold effect. The constant, lag, effort, "cost" free stimulation is indeed different. I have to manage my mood through sports and or fasting to hope my brain can sustain more than 10 min of calm reading.
I still have "open tab" reflexes anytime I get next to my laptop and my eyes shift left regularly just as-if there were some google news side bar stream coming.
Can you quantify or prove that we are more distracted?
There’s quite a bit of data. The early chapters of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari provides a good overview of the research, which shows that people are increasingly switching their attention from one thing to another (both in longitudinal research studies and by analyzing things like how long topics trend in the news). He then goes on to summarize research that shows how “intelligence” drops when people switch focus too quickly. Eg speed reading drops retention, multitasking reduces IQ, etc.
That just shows the effects but not whether people were more distracted in the past
You responded to the second sentence, not the first.
"The early chapters of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari provides a good overview of the research, which shows that people are increasingly switching their attention from one thing to another"
Screenshot of 4 relevant pages from the book: https://i.imgur.com/AwwdEc4.png
The most important part, for me, was this bit:
> What they discovered is there is one mechanism that can make this happen every time. You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
It's okay, they just got distracted! :P
I'm sure this question is coming from an earnest place, but does it not stand to reason that the sheer amount of information we have almost ubiquitous access to, combined with personalized content recommendation, means that we are more distracted than a medieval person who had no exposure to such things? How would one even try to assert this empirically?
A medieval person also didn't go through school, likely wasn't taught how to read or forced to work through math problems and do almost 20 years of schooling with the intention of improving their thinking skills, analytical skills, memory and attention.
So it is not obvious at all which effects dominate and if this isn't just the same drivel that Gessner spouted in the 1500's about how books and the printing press were going to create an information overload and ruin our attention
- https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/a-history-of-media-tech...
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/3654293
Given how popular TikTok and short form content is with the younger generations who are currently in school or just graduated from 20 something years of schooling, I don't think all that intention of improving their "thinking skills, analytical skills, memory and attention" is that effective at countering contemporary distractions. Have you seen the latest trend where Gen Z'ers zone out by watching a TikTok that has a family guy clip, some arts and crafts clip, and some gameplay footage all on the same screen? It is the epitome of distraction and it's catching on like wildfire because people watching these switch between each subject on screen just enough to hold their attention. The algorithm is rewarding that, so more and more TikToks have composite videos.
Going back to the subject of contemporary education, one could also speculate that ~20 years of schooling replacing ~20 years of apprenticeship and mastery of a single craft makes the ability to resist distraction worse. Perhaps teaching someone to make wagon wheels for 20 years makes them better able to focus on a single thing than teaching them to learn all sorts of different subjects for a few hours each day?
People like to look back at previous generation's moral panics, but I can't help but think there was an element of truth to many of them.
> People like to look back at previous generation's moral panics, but I can't help but think there was an element of truth to many of them.
What is the element of truth then? What was the negative impact of the printing press and how did it end society and our ability to pay attention to things?
It's so strange to have someone hear that their concern has existed for hundreds of years, the doom and gloom never materialized, and yet still double down on the same thing. What besides your intuition or the fact you share the same fear actually would lead you to think that this time it's different and tiktok is the technology that'll ruin us?
>the doom and gloom never materialized
I mean, didn't it for some people? The church lost their ability to be the sole source of the bible once printing presses started churning out books. So the church lost a significant aspect of their influence on the public.
In effect when there are people screaming about societal changes it typically means they stand to lose some position of power they currently hold because of it.
You're introducing unrelated things. This thread is about human's attention span, ability to focus and memorize due to how we consume media as new technologies are developed.
It's not about a technology being able to displace power away from a specific organization or not. That's not an argument anyone was making here.
>"What was the negative impact of the printing press and how did it end society and our ability to pay attention to things?"
That's quite a leap from what I said. I took the stance that there is an element of truth, or at the very least a valid concern. Not that the printing press was going to end society. The tone of the linked article is definitely dismissive, something akin to "why be concerned, look at all these similar panics. We're doing just fine."
>"His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press."
This is exactly what happened. The printing press was fundamental to the Catholic/Protestant schism, enabled political pamphleteering, and is what caused newspapers to come into existence. Yes, society survived this, but the concern was no doubt real and realized. As for "the doom and gloom never materialized", what is fake news and misinformation but an unmanageable flood of information?
>"or the fact you share the same fear actually would lead you to think that this time it's different and tiktok is the technology that'll ruin us?"
You're putting words in my mouth. I do not think TikTok is going to ruin society, but I do believe it is having a negative effect on many individuals within it. You had mentioned "doubling down on the same thing", but I think that is misplaced. Superficially the concern is the same, but the cause is different. There hasn't been anything like TikTok and algorithmic recommendation in the history of civilization, so it would be wrong to dismissively assume the panic will pass and concerns about its effects are unfounded and unwarranted because that's what happened with books, radio, television, and so on.
Wouldn't they have to be more mindful of safety and personal health. Like an increase in dangers from criminals, food, buildings, etc
Can't recall many people trying to read a book on a bike.
For some reason they seem to think it will work when the book is electronic and small enough.
> For some reason they seem to think it will work when the book is electronic and small enough.
Do you mean a stationary exercise bike?
I don't read books on those because I am usually sweating and I don't want to get that on the book. Also, most paperbacks are pretty springy, so sometimes I need to have one hand holding them open, or some kind of clip system on the bike.
iPads or Kindles don't have these problems, so I can certainly imagine using them instead. I don't, probably because of an irrational aversion to getting anything from the grungy gym on my personal devices.
When the weather gets nice in nyc, the bike lanes fill up with people slowly meandering about the lane as they cycle one-handed, eyes glued to their cellphones.
My unscientific, purely vibes based take is that the ubiquity of the smartphone has created such widespread severe dopamine addiction that basic human judgment and even self preservation instinct is increasingly impaired.
Well, once when I was out walking, I saw someone peeing on a trail side, dick in one hand, phone in the other. There is a social crisis of some sort and we basically have no idea how to get out of it.
It was the Japanese who made phones water resistant so that you could text in the shower.
My unscientific, purely vibes based take is that we are made dependant on stuff like google, internet and smartphones, so, why learn? why memorize?
> Do you mean a stationary exercise bike?
You may be surprised to learn people do text and bike. I’ve done it on occasion when running late to a meetup with friends.
It’s … not very safe.
No no, actual bicycles. The Netherlands, famous for having 1.3 bicycles per capita [1], has implemented a law intended to prevent mobile phone use on very non-stationary, moving bicycles [2].
[1] https://amsterdamfox.com/news/the-number-of-bicycles-per-cap... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/27/dutch-cyclists...
I see people checking their phone while riding a bicycle all the time.
An exhortation to consider effect sizes is different to a claim about the effect sizes in a specific situation. It could be that OP is doing both, but you appear to be neglecting the former.
It's obvious
[dead]
Bet they'd have been more distracted if you held a no-expense-spared carnival with entertainers and games and sports of all sorts and intellectuals and blow-hards from all over the world gathered in and around their monastery, whooping it up and putting on plays, shows (some of them... gasp, sex shows!), speeches, round-tables, demonstrations, et c., 24/7, non-stop.
That's what every place is like, now, with always-on available-everywhere Internet. Any of us can switch from whatever we're doing, to paying attention to the carnival, in about two seconds flat, anywhere, any time—and that's when the carnival's not actively bugging us to come take a look. It's always right there, tempting us.
That is a significant part of it, but there's more to the problem.
Consider the simple task of looking up the definition of a word that you've been pondering. In pre-internet times, you'd physically have to move your body toward a specific room and seek a specific book. There may be a carnival, but even if you look that way and get distracted, you can reorient yourself and refocus on your goal by simply assessing your physical positioning and posture in space. "Ah yes, I am standing in this hallway facing east because that's where the library is."
On your phone, you pull it out of your pocket and unlock it. Probably the unlocking is not distracting on its own, but it's also quite possible that you've got some "useful" information on your lockscreen which can distract you immediately. Bad start, but let's pretend it doesn't happen.
Ok, now you're on your phone. There's a bunch of different apps, many of them actively trying to capture your attention - carnival-goers calling out to you to look at their show. Alright, distraction achieved - now tear yourself away and get back to your task. What was that task again? You see a bunch of apps, and you're curious about what's in them. And it would only take seconds to get a little bit of value from any of them - news, uplifting stories, comedy, whatever. Can context help? You're in the same place physically and emotionally that you are for most of your life, on your couch (or maybe in front of your actual computer). Nothing is different from the times when you are actually intentionally opening those apps. Oh well, it will come to you, just pass some time at the carnival...
In a perverse sense, maybe it's good.
The choices we make can be divided into creation and consumption. The more you can push yourself to create, the more power you'll wield. If you can control what you consume, it'll make you a better creator.
Easily available distraction raises the activation energy of your would-be competitors. If you can avoid the distraction yourself, you can get ahead.
A twisted way of looking at it, but it has some truth.
Yeah, this is my problem.
....and Hacker News is part of it, at the moment. Gonna close this tab and go work on something for awhile.
See also allegory Plato's Cave. I think I'll sign off the world wide carnival for today.
The difference between a medieval monk and a smartphone-wielding modern is that the former had fewer options for dopamine-generating distractions, while we have a limitless supply in our pocket. At a certain point the monk might be so bored that a treatise by Avicenna might actually be preferable to doing nothing at all, and that is no small inducement to deep progress, the processing of emotions, and contemplation more generally.
Funny thing about mentioning Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and "dopamine-generating distractions".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00855lt
Avicenna apparently had a very strict schedule of putting down the quill and enjoying the company of his women. So now, the fact of his genius notwithstanding, what does that do with the dopamine and distraction theorem given this man was unbelievably productive in his life?
https://historyofphilosophy.net/did-avicenna-kill-himself-ha...
I've also seen it suggested that modern tech is causing people today to be less in touch with their physical bodies and the bodies of those around them. I personally think I'm much happier and more "productive" when I have access to physical intimacy (which, as with perhaps many people today, is less often than I would prefer). Perhaps it's all related?
Add the discipline bit (which he had in spades) and I think you may have something there. I'm struggling a bit thinking of the correct word here; satisfaction and contentment come to mind, as well as un-settled mind when dissatisfied.
It all seems to boil down to the mind, and where you stand on the mind-body (none?) issue. These days I'm tending to be far more accepting of the unified view that dispenses with the duality.
The un-settled mind is prone to distraction, naturally.
My mind is definitely more focused and at peace if I have recently cuddled or had sex with a friend in the past couple of days.
I would not consider a scheduled physical/social/emotional activity to be a distraction. Is eating lunch a distraction? Is sleeping a distraction? If anything, I think Avicenna supports the value of reducing distraction.
> Avicenna apparently had a very strict schedule of putting down the quill and enjoying the company of his women. So now, the fact of his genius notwithstanding, what does that do with the dopamine and distraction theorem given this man was unbelievably productive in his life?
Probably not much. I forget the exact term, but when people refer to "dopamine" in the contact of distraction, they're not really talking about dopamine in general, but rather things like slot-machine-like random enforcement engagement mechanisms (which can be explicitly designed, like in social media apps, or accidentally "fall out" of new tech-enabled activities).
I'm not sure they're mutually exclusive categories. A friend became a monk and I've visited several times, some of the monks have and use smartphones.
Modern monks at least have almost no unstructured time, or freedom to select a new task merely because they're tired of the current one. I don't know if this is how medieval monks lived but I suspect it wasn't that different.
So I suspect boredom in its usual sense is not part of the experience, because "nothing at all" isn't an activity that they do. Almost their entire long day is specifically allocated to focused tasks. I'm sure their minds wander during prayer and attention flags during routine toil. But they have no freedom to choose something else, and so never get to do something like read a book "out of boredom."
I experienced one of those strict Vipassana retreat for 10 days where most of the distraction you take for granted in today's life are forbidden: no reading, no talking, no phone, no internet, no physical contact in the premises and no contact from people outside. It's the closest it can be to a life's monk. Your day is clearly structured, essentially waking up at 4am, meditating, doing some simple tasks, meditating, eating, meditating, eating, meditating, sleeping. If you play the game (which I did), you literally spend 10h/day meditating. In a sense "boredom" just becomes an experience by itself which paradoxically isn't boring anymore.
As it's been noticed here, surely monks were not distracted by the same technology and at the same scale we are distracted to in today's world. When I came back to the "real world" from this experience, I could realise how much one life's was just constantly distracted.
I have been around monks and spent extended stretches of time at Orthodox Christian monasteries, and I'd like to clarify a couple of things: monks can and do get distracted and they can, indeed, just leave their cell and go outside if they want to. There is a passion called "acedia" that attacks every monk to a greater or lesser degree. Acedia is the "spirit of noonday". It's distraction. It's the desire to do anything else except whatever it is you're doing (especially prayer). It's the desire to be somewhere else or to do something else. It can take the form of gluttony, or the form of going to talk to another monk, or the form of just going for a walk instead of praying.
Also, monks are praying the whole time. All the time. They are usually repeating a short prayer in their minds while they work, while they walk, while they eat. All the time. Of course, they get distracted and their minds wander (especially the newer monks), but the aspiration is to "pray continually". They aren't just letting their minds wander around and think about whatever they want. A lot of their effort and attention goes into constantly guarding their minds against distracting thoughts and re-focusing on prayer.
Monks (Orthodox Christian monks, anyway) do, indeed, have freedom to choose something else, but the whole point of their ascetic struggle is to ignore those impulses and to stay in prayer.
[dead]
https://archive.is/1XYY9
thank you
The argument of humanity living a perpetual zombie state is hard to buy into when comparing the past and present. Especially when comparing monks who arguably have dedicated much of their life to awareness.
The differences of “distractions” are what matters here. Being distracted with god, your body, your emotions, or your mind is a human condition. Being distracted with artificial things is another.
Monks have extensive memories. Contemporary man has the memory of a goldfish. Two completely different ways the brain can work if given the right amount of stress and daily practice.
Much research has shown that those who meditate regularly have built a deliberate skill to focus their attention where needed. Many people struggle to do even that as modern attention is much more scattered between artificial distractions.
On memory:
Is memory even that useful anymore? Now that we are all literate and can offload our knowledge to our devices, perhaps the ability to keep that written information organized and having systems is a more useful skill than being able to recall the information directly from your head.
It's a philosophical question and subjective.
Anyone can go from a fast brain to a slow mind and vice-versa.
Only your experience can tell you the usefulness.
In other words, how does knowledge become wisdom? Reflection, experience, and insight. Offloading that knowledge does nothing for us.
Which is why they invented clocks, to remind them to focus on prayer. Unfortunately however, their clock towers inadvertently caused the break from solar/biological time to artificial "time-keeping" and via John Harrison's marine chronometer to imperial adventure, plunder and modernity that buried God in the "tombs and sepulchres" of His dead churches.
Sometimes it's just best to let the mind wander.
My first thought is that the distractions on your smartphone are more vapid and and they keep you from noticing the real world around you. The equivalent I can recall was reading books on the NYC subway on the way to High School or home. The book was chosen by me and did not beep or vibrate while in my pocket, and I was still aware of my surroundings. I'll take old school distractions any day. Phones vibrating and beeping are Pavlovian, and we are the dogs in the system.
Edit: I find reading HN like picking up the newspaper. I appreciate the simple layout, but I can make a comment and be active if I choose.
You have the choice. My phone is always in fully silent mode. I choose when I get updates from it. Only a few people are on an emergency list that make the phone ring and they know not to bother me for mundane things.
You have to be really educated and be aware of the potential risks of losing your attention via the phone. Most of the people just rely on it to not think about stuff or to not think about problems, and maybe for them it's not a choice.
Yes, but just look around you on a crowded bus or train. Most people are walking or riding with their heads down at the phone. You are the exception.
And that's still a choice.
First I want to take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite books as of late: "Sayings of the desert fathers". It is a collection of writings from very early Christian monks (around 200AD): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140447318/. Cannot recommend this enough.
You can read more about these monks here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fathers?useskin=vector
And here is a famous quote from Saint Anthony: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.”
This is relevant because a lot of the things in this book have to do with removing distractions. The monks were doing it to pray.
Okay that said:
Something I've been noticing about myself lately, which could just be reading comprehension decline?
I tend to skim what people write heavily. So much of what people write seems completely pointless. ChatGPT and other LLMs have really laid this bare. You can take a simple statement like "tell this person that I can't make it to dinner", and it will expand it into several paragraphs of niceties, but the actual information is the same.
I've noticed that it makes it difficult to switch back to information-dense reading, and to actually read all of it instead of reflexively skimming it to try and glean out the seed.
> I've noticed that it makes it difficult to switch back to information-dense reading, and to actually read all of it instead of reflexively skimming it to try and glean out the seed.
Keeping on the religious theme I've noticed this with the Psalms, even before considering the GPT stuff. I think I grew up taught to be over-dismissive of many types of poetry. I always had an impression that it was mostly just silly space-filling pseduo-deep reused imagery and repetition. School didn't help dissuade me of this.
For me, I think the thing to overcome is to focus on the value of a sense of respect for the author and the work unto itself, rather than just valuing the "understanding" you get from the text (which will always be shaped by preconceptions). A sense of awe (maybe at divine inspiration, maybe at near-divine genius, or maybe just at the sacrifice of time and life-force an ordinary person gave up to create something). For the example of the Psalms, I have noticed that despite finding the language clunky at first, they have a certain way of sticking in your head that prose does not.
A strategy I've been focusing on recently is giving myself permission to reread (and maybe memorize) important/enjoyable works. Reading something twice is basically the opposite of skimming, or a way to counteract skimming. There probably is such a thing as rereading something more than it deserves (I reread Calvin and Hobbes for the zillionth time recently, which I still deeply enjoy but now it's more of a way to relax my mind before bed than a source of insight) but there are certainly works that do deserve it [1].
Anyway, something I've been thinking about a lot as well and I agree that it's fascinating to consider how fundamental is it to the human condition that monks have been struggling with it for millennia. The book recommendation is appreciated.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0OY1RDe8Yg
tl;dr, but here's the difference: we willingly purchase devices that are sworn servants of entities who profit from grabbing our attention, engagement, and cash.
I doubt that you can say a monk, who may be distrated by flies buzzing, or cows mooing, or his brothers' quills scratching at vellum, is on the same plane of distraction as someone who's jacked in to the Cybernet at all times.
There's an interdependence and reliance on these distraction factories, now, where people have given over functions to their phone: such as wallet, notebook, any and all communications with loved ones (especially in the post-C19, increasingly isolated urban wastelands.) If we can't live without our phones, and we rely on our phones for the minimum functions of life, what does that say for their ability to distract us?
Monks who are good at prayer are good at managing distractions. You don't simply "shut them out" or shun them. You roll with them like a reed swaying in the wind. I have practiced a tiny bit of Centering Prayer (see also, Hesychasm or Mindfulness). It is marvellous. I simply wish I could do it every day and live a lifestyle that's centered on Christ. Needs lots of devotion and practice. It won't reduce my distractions or ruminations, but it will help me become the master of my own thoughts.
I asked ChatGPT 4 to tell me from that article the key actionable takeaways people can apply to their daily lives. I'm sleep deprived and prefer that to reading a long-winded article. Here's the response:
"Firstly, it highlights the importance of daydreaming and mind-wandering as a way to promote creativity, problem-solving, and self-reflection. Readers are encouraged to carve out time in their schedules for these activities, rather than dismissing them as distractions.
Secondly, the review emphasizes the importance of boredom in stimulating creativity and the generation of new ideas. It suggests that people should embrace boredom and resist the urge to fill every moment of their day with stimulation, as this can stifle creative thinking.
Thirdly, the book review discusses the potential benefits of practices such as meditation, mindfulness, and journaling in promoting self-reflection and reducing stress. It suggests that these practices can help people to better understand their own thought processes and cultivate a greater sense of well-being.
Finally, the review highlights the role of technology in shaping our attentional habits and urges readers to be mindful of their use of technology. It suggests that people should be intentional about their use of technology and take steps to reduce distractions and increase focus, such as turning off notifications and limiting screen time.
Overall, the book review provides actionable takeaways that readers can apply to their daily lives, such as prioritizing daydreaming and mind-wandering, embracing boredom, practicing mindfulness and journaling, and being intentional about technology use."
No one is suggesting distraction is an entirely unique phenomenon that's ridiculous.
But monks did not have multiple objects actively trying to engage their attention.
The closest historical similar situation I can think is the Victorian Gin houses.
Even books can only engage passively and only those who could read.
As a young adult who constantly finds themself glued to their phone for much too long, I can relate to the distraction-epidemic. Does anyone know of any good solutions out there for helping curb the "addiction" to screens a bit?
Clearspace is an option here: https://www.getclearspace.com
I'm not affiliated in any way, just heard about them in the latest YC batch.
I wonder why humans have been concerned with being distracted for so long. And I think we can wonder about it without refuting social networks can be (though not always) bad for you.
Yeah, and Clippy could also talk to you and give suggestions and such. ChatGPT is nothing new.
We will never know