I never finish anyth

May 12, 2009

WAIT! Don’t click away. Don’t. Honestly, I know there is something more interesting on the other side. There is, absolutely and for sure. But here on the interweb there is always something more interesting on the other side. There are billions of sides!

I don’t know about you, but I have been feeling extremely fragmented lately. What with twitter and blogging and work and children and the Four Corners report I missed last night but want to catch up with, the Ricky Gervais interview that I just stumbled upon, the three new business ideas that are nagging at me, and the rest, the constant distraction is driving me to… distraction.

… sorry. Just checked my email. Nothing but spam as usual, but a couple of good jokes on twitter. Where was I…O yes…

I don’t know about you, in particular, but I do know that it is not only me. Just about everyone I talk to reports the same problem, a singular difficulty in actually concentrating on the same thing for more than a few minutes. It is a population-wide pandemic of attention deficit disorder.

And I do think technology is the cause – because technology today is so compelling – there is no urge too base or trivial, no question too difficult, no task too complex that it can’t be addressed immediately by a quick interweb surf. And if you don’t find satisfaction on that particular item, no matter, something just as distracting will come along during your search, and your original concern will get buried under a pile of new, equally trivial, grave or compelling.

Does it matter?

In a new book, Rapt: Attention and the deliberate life, Winifred Gallagher argues that it does matter, not because being distracted is in itself a bad thing, not because of some fogeyish sense of things were better back when, but because being distracted makes for more fragmented being. Gallagher argues that the self is the sum of the things that we focus on. And by focusing on many things but nothing really very much, we become fragmented as people.
The skillful management of attention is the key to a happy life, says Gallagher. She recommends actively taking control by taking one’s mind by the scruff of the neck, as it were, and forcing it away from the destructive or dispiriting and towards what seems meaningful, productive or energising.

Is this the wisdom of the ages? Isn’t this the advice of the meditation teacher at the top of the mount who instructs you to stop the internal chatter, the delirious bounce of thoughts inside your skull, the permanent state of distraction that fragments so much of our day.

Easier said than done, perhaps. For the moment I have to check my email. And put this on my blog. And twitter it. Then get back to work.

*headline with thanks to twitter post from some bar in America from some musician I’ve never heard of.

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