
The ages of distraction - jonbaer
https://aeon.co/essays/busy-and-distracted-everybody-has-been-since-at-least-1710
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nuttinwrong
As someone who at one point grew up without the internet, I think I can safely
say that my attention has gone out the window with the web. There are just too
many things to look at now and browser tabs are constantly competing for my
attention. In fact, I would blame inattention for the lack of personal success
in my life. Hell, it was even hard getting through the entire article, I just
wanted to skip to the end and read the comments. Ugh... sad. Also, it doesn't
help that we have news feeds like Hacker News, Designer News, Reddit
etc...spewing info left and right. Before the sharing of information you'd be
familiar with the work of a few, now everything is out there and your access
to information is pretty much unlimited - that's a lot of info competing for
limited attention.

~~~
nextos
I have an interesting anecdote. When I started my CS degree almost a decade
and a half ago, my dad refused to get me an Internet connection for our home.
To give you an idea how uncommon this was already, during the first week an
interview amongst the 375 enrolled students was conducted. I was the only one
without a DSL or fiber connection at his disposal.

I was furious, but in retrospective it may have been the reason behind my
success.

No connection forced me doing lots of things differently. For programming
work, I relied only on offline documentation (man pages, MSDN...) and I set up
my own servers instead of telnet-ing to the uni machines. The learning curve
was a lot steeper, but after some struggle I was way more productive than my
peers.

For freshman and sophomore theoretical courses, I simply cherry-picked top
books with extreme care cause I knew I couldn't rely on help coming from the
brand new forums for TAing our school had set up. Students hacked around
exercises, but I had to fight the Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics and a few
others.

It ended up as a huge success for me. I ranked as student #1 not only in my
fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated
from CS at the same time. This made me appreciate the value of deep and hard
knowledge good books provide. Now, many years later I am struggling to return
to that lifestyle while keeping some online presence...

~~~
davnicwil
> I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole
> country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time.

Congratulations! I've never heard of a cross-university ranking of individual
students before. Out of curiosity which country is that and how does the
ranking work?

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kordless
Having been the poster child for this not so long ago, my advice to others
dealing with distraction is to read about Buddhism. The Eightfold Path is
basically an algorithmic approach to resolving cognitive dissonance.
Dissonance can be viewed as a form of brain spam. It makes you inefficient and
illogical. It's also contagious for those who aren't inoculated against it.

By finding the path and practicing it, the approach may give you access to
enlightenment. That state then brings about a change in the brain which
results in a quieter brain. I liken it to permanent and constantly available
flow.

These are just my opinions based on experience. Everyone should find their own
way to the truth.

~~~
natdempk
Do you have a recommended starting source for this practice? A book or reading
that outlines the ideology and practices?

~~~
timClicks
The in vogue term for secular Bhuddism is mindfulness.

~~~
kordless
Keeping things sacred slows you down. Slowing down is good because it forces
efficiencies as you grind toward aesthetics. As Gregory Bateson said to a
colleague, "Keep your systems simple". _That_ is mindfulness.

I'm not a fan of the term Secular Buddhism for the simple reason Gautama
Buddha warned on, which is taking the concept and twisting it into something
that is used to advance or elevate one person's belief over another's. We're
all in this together, ergo we are Buddha Nature. No sense in complicating
things.

Complications are inefficiencies. Keep your systems simple.

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raziel2701
Do the same complaints exist from thinkers/pholosophers of Asia? I feel like
there is a substantial difference in thought from the Buddhists for instance,
and the zen way of thinking that encourages people to accept who they are.
This idea of self-improvement, which is what's at the bottom of all these
critiques of the young being inattentive and distracted, is dismantled by
people like Alan Watts who claims that the reason why you want to be better is
the same reason why you aren't.

In essence, people like Watts want to tell you, or convince you, that there's
nothing you can do to improve, you would already be that person if you had it
in you. Now I'm not here to argue whether or not this view is correct nor am I
interested in reading your anecdotes on how that can't be right. What I am
interested in knowing is whether or not these complaints about distraction and
inattention are uniquely Western. What do the Africans or the Asians say about
this through the course of history?

~~~
auganov
I'd say complaining and being open about your own shortcomings is a somewhat
Western thing in general.

Kind of ties into the concepts of guilt vs shame societies.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_society)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society)

~~~
johnchristopher
> The distinction between shame and guilt as methods of social control has
> long been recognized.

Both articles cites very few sources about that distinction being useful or
acknowledged by sociology. I see both articles relies heavily on « Japanese
Perceptions of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ».

Is there more substance and relevance to the concept ? What does it explain ?

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shubhamjain
I remember sitting with my father who was filing taxes, manually doing all the
calculations and noting down the numbers in a spreadsheet like form. While
finalizing, it took a two hour debugging session to find the mistaken
calculation that had trickled down to the result.

The fact that now I don't even need to know the complexity of tax structure to
file taxes let alone do calculations makes me wonder if people waste time
because technology has enabled us to save so much of it.

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iliketosleep
Distractions are not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, they aid the process of
discovery. The issue is that nowadays our distractions are "on demand" and
"personalized", which, if we're not careful, can take away the benefits and
leave us worse off.

~~~
gtirloni
I think the overall complain is that discovery never gives way to creating and
it frustrates people. Sort of like when we spend all day reading about which
programming language is the best for this and that but there are zero lines of
code written at the end of the day.

~~~
iliketosleep
i see what you're saying, but i wouldn't say never. the odd time that
distraction does lead to creation could in fact be very significant. i'd be
very surprised if there weren't some startup ideas born out of distraction :)

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pradex
Personally I have been a victim of this, about 7-8 years ago I was so much
able to sit at one place without a phone or internet and study for 14-16
Hours. And I loved how much I was able to do in a single day, but today I find
reading a book or a long article so hard (Even while writing this comment I
was distracted thrice by my phone beeping for attention), In last few days I
have been trying hard to get back to how It all used to be but nothing has
been working. We give more attention to unimportant things today than to
ourself. These digital devices and options are biggest attention seeker today
and once you give them the toe they will suck you up whole inside. Please help
me with some methods if anyone has I would appreciate finding a way out of
this digital/social mess.

~~~
bcook
You gave the device access (to yourself), you must take it away...

From the other side, I have very little social interaction (no phone or
Facebook) and I'm not so sure it's a better choice. Sure, I have free time,
but I am also "out of the loop", which has it's own social stigma.

~~~
AznHisoka
Can you clarify how it makes you feel? Is it that you feel you are missing out
on social interaction that you desire?

~~~
bcook
It's like a drug addiction (Facebook, & to a lesser extent, cell phones). I
enjoy it, but I do not accomplish anything I am proud of.

I tell myself that I am more useful when I focus on making meaningful
contributions to something, rather than stroking my ego by seeking _likes_ or
_upvotes_. I probably just need to balance things better, but I cannot... just
as an addict cannot do just a little of <drug>.

~~~
Jonathanks
I read Nicole Taylor's "Schooled on Fat - What Teens Tell Us About Gender,
Body-image and Obesity" recently and I think it has some themes related to
this feeling of helplessness. Just as the teens surveyed knew junk food was
bad but couldn't resist it, we know spending too much time on these
distractions is bad but we end up doing it. Interestingly, peer influence and
social acceptability seem to be involved in this too, as it was in her study.
We have to get 'social' so we don't appear to be odd and 'not modern'. And the
media has been a major actor in strengthening and spreading these beliefs.

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ranprieur
This makes some important points but misses a big one: The authorities become
concerned about people not paying attention, when the things they want people
to pay attention to are not interesting.

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ThomPete
It's not the age of distraction, it's the age of extreme information
accumulation.

The consequence of the lack of attentionspan is greatly exaggerated.

Our scientists aren't getting less able to do science, our writers and
musicians aren't getting less able to write or perform. Our mathematicians
aren't getting less able to solve mathematical problems.

In aggregate humans through the use of technology is charging on becoming ever
more sophisticated. A society without technology would not be able to have
accumulated the knowledge we have today. People without ability are being
helped by technology.

With the worlds collective information doubling in something that resembles
Moores Law for most people it would simply be unwise to focus too much.

What I think we need to realize is that we don't need everyone to be expert
specialists. We need a mix of experts specialists and specialist generalists.

------
dmichulke
_The unoccupied mind is the workshop of the devil_ -Brazilian proverb

~~~
Jonathanks
That proverb seems to have many origins and variants, including religious
roots. But is idleness really the problem? One can choose to occupy one's mind
with better things and even suppress negative inclinations.

