Nothing held our attention yesterday, but everything seemed to grab it. We went from thought to thought and task to task without ever really having a full thought or completing a whole task. We half-considered and semi-did things all day long. This happens sometimes. Folks who make grand claims would say that our inability to focus is just because we presently live in THE AGE OF DISTRACTION. They’d chalk our divided and subdivided attention up to the internet, social media, Furbies, cellular telephones, running water, or some other ostensibly awful and pernicious contemporary thing. Distraction, though, isn’t new.
Aristotle, towards the end of his Nicomachean Ethics, suggests that our ability to pay attention to things is tied to the amount of pleasure or pain they inspire in us. “For people who are fond of playing the flute are incapable of attending to arguments if they overhear someone playing the flute, since they enjoy flute-playing more than the activity in hand; so the pleasure connected with flute-playing destroys the activity concerned with argument.”
Setting aside the very relatable example of flutes and arguments, Aristotle’s suggestion makes intuitive sense. Our attention is drawn towards things we like. A little later, he offers a different example. “[I]n the theatre the people who eat sweets do so most when the actors are poor.” Here it isn’t so much that folks are drawn to things they like, but rather their attention wanes because of something they dislike. Bad actors cause displeasure, so you seek out the pleasure of Skittles to compensate for it. Our attention, on Aristotle’s account, is contingent on our likes and dislikes, on what causes us pleasure and pain.
This definitely captures something true about distraction. It’s easy to think of an example or two. We are definitely guilty of being inattentive to a conversation with friends because someone, say, one table over was saying truly crazy shit. The pleasure of eavesdropping sometimes wins out over the pleasure of listening to so-and-so talk about their new couch. Likewise, the displeasure of a bad movie might propel us to seek solace in popcorn. We can also, similarly, imagine situations where everything seems too pleasant or too unpleasant. You might be at a restaurant where everything is so pleasant or unpleasant - from the food to the decor to the company - that you can’t fix your attention on anything specific for very long.
But as much as this pleasure/displeasure view of attention makes sense, it wasn’t what we struggled with yesterday. See, we didn’t go from displeasing stuff to pleasing stuff or pleasing stuff to differently pleasing stuff, but rather from mere stuff to a kind of empty state that was neither pleasing nor displeasing. It looked something like this:
We wouldn’t, here, want to say that this is a state of being distracted from the pleasures of reading by the pleasures of staring blankly at nothing. It’s rather a momentary lapse in the idea of pleasure itself. It’s a sort of interruption by nothing. It’s like our mind arrested itself; we just sort of stopped. Aristotle, in De Anima, seems to allude to this kind of thing when, in an aside, he notes that he’ll have to eventually address “[w]hy thought is not always thinking” - but he never really gives an account of why thinking sometimes isn’t thinking at all or why it is that we can sometimes be pulled away from displeasure or pleasure by some kind of “not thinking.” [Maybe he got distracted before he could get to this?]
In any event, we went from pleasures and displeasures to blankness and back constantly yesterday. Music, emails, a book, the internet, a movie, and various other mostly trivial things just couldn’t hold our attention. We tried to correct or corral our mind, but it didn’t work. It’s a strange thing to try to use one’s thoughts to correct one’s thoughts. We’d normally say that the malfunctioning thing can’t possibly be used to fix the malfunctioning thing - e.g. we wouldn’t try to use our broken arm to heal our broken arm - but, well, we sometimes try to use our mind to fix our mind.
This obviously didn’t work.
We weren’t feeling listless or lackadaisical or any other rare L-word. We wanted to want to do things. On different days, the things we had in front of us would have held us rapt easily. The book we were trying to read is great (Sophie Mackintosh’s Cursed Bread), the music we were listening to was too (Folly Group’s Awake and Hungry EP), the movie we watched in fits and starts was interesting (Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure) - but we couldn’t stay with any of it for any meaningful amount of time. We stopped reading mid-chapter, turned the music off mid-song, paused the movie with thirty minutes left. This wasn’t, even, because unpleasant things or responsibilities of some kind were making demands on us. There wasn’t a bill to pay, an email to respond to, a thing to fix, etc. The practical, everyday stuff that makes up our days was fine, status quo. We were, though, all the same pulled every which way and no way at all. We absolutely could not pay attention.
The language we use around attention is peculiar. We talk about paying attention, giving attention, or having a deficit of attention. Attention is like currency. It’s something we decide to spend (if we have enough) on something else. And that something else? It solicits, begs, grabs, catches, holds, or keeps our attention. On one side, attention is something you offer, owe, or lack. On the other side, attention is something that needs to be teased out, forcibly taken, and restrained. The transaction is framed as voluntary and involuntary at once. Regardless of this imbalance, this means that attention is never yours forever. Whatever you might do with your attention or have done with it, you can’t keep it. You can be an attention whore (hi!), but you can’t be an attention miser.
We don’t, though, carry the terms or the logic of attention over to distraction. You get distracted like you get sick. You are distracted like you are hurt. Distraction isn’t something you have, but something you become. It’s a state or condition of being. And what renders you distracted or does the distracting? Literally anything! We often just use demonstrative pronouns when we talk about distraction. You get distracted by that or this. We just name a thing and point to it as the source of distraction. Normally we have to apologize for it. “Sorry, that literally anything else distracted me. What were you saying about the Met Gala?” Distractions aren’t a shared experience even if the phenomenon that causes the distraction is. A distraction is often ours and ours alone.
Sometimes distraction isn’t even a matter of intervening outside sights or sounds - but some interrupting thought or associated idea. Someone says something which reminds you of something else and off you go, privately, thinking things quite detached from the facts in front of you. We can even distract ourselves. We say, horrifyingly, we lost our train of thought. How does that happen? Imagine losing a whole train! What a disaster. Trains go on rails. How is it that we regularly allow our own trains to vanish, rails and all!?
We usually just roll with it, let it happen, don’t question, and hope things go away or get back on track of their own accord. Yesterday, though, we got frustrated. We didn’t want to be distracted.
We decided, then, that maybe a change of scenery would do us some good. We remembered that there was some place we wanted to check out way out east. We Googled it, then - yep - got distracted.
Because we weren’t paying close attention to anything, we didn’t read the little label naming the place. We were just thrown by the huge green and networked space. Quickly enough, we recognized that this was a cemetery and clicked the little name to find out more.
Had this been any other day, this’d be the end of things. We’d have learned that there’s a cemetery named after St. Francis of Assisi and resume doing what we had set out to do - but the world was actively conspiring against us. No single task could be completed. Everything we aimed to do would, invariably, be perverted and prevented by some distracting other thing. This cemetery has reviews. It’s a 3.9 star cemetery. This, understandably (?), caught our attention. Is it common knowledge that people are reviewing cemeteries? Is this a regular feature of the world that we’ve failed to attend to? Is this a good or bad rating for a cemetery? Is there a cemetery review aggregator like Rotten Tomatoes? Is it called Wilting Flowers?
We’ve (strangely?) never paid much attention to any cemetery long enough to judge it on a 5-star scale. Our experience of graveyards tends, mostly, to exclude judgment of the yards themselves. We’re usually caught up with thoughts of a different kind. We’re focused on why we’re there, the person we’re there with or for, and caught up with associated thoughts such that the cemetery itself could well be any which way and we’d (likely?) never notice. But, evidently, other folks experience cemeteries otherwise.
There isn’t really a common object praised or denounced in these reviews. The negative reviews attend to how the cemetery conducts business (e.g. by nurturing flies indifferent to weather, capturing screaming ladies) while the positive reviews center on what the cemetery contains (e.g. pokemons, parents). The focus of concern shifts from review to review and, with that focus, the star rating.
These reviews were interesting for a brief moment. We were a little (a lot) distressed that some of these cemetery reviews got more likes that our typical post on here, but we couldn’t think about that for too long lest we walk directly into traffic. Distracting ourselves from the distracting thought that cemetery reviews might be more appreciated or useful than blog posts (which, to be fair, is fair enough but still upsetting), we tried to focus in again on the cemetery itself.
We’d never been to that cemetery, so we looked at a few pictures. We checked to see if any notable people were interred there. We looked up when Google allowed people to review everything in the world (2007). We checked out some of the cemetery reviewers’ other reviews (mostly restaurants, rarely other cemeteries). We read some articles about the impact of online reviews and the influence negative ones can have on folks (positive and negative). In brief, we clicked around for a while looking at whatever caught our eye until our eye was uncaught and our attention wandered free in search of some other thing.
To give the people who talk about THE AGE OF DISTRACTION their due, it is probably far easier to flit from minimally interesting thing to minimally interesting thing, minor pleasure to minor pleasure, in the present than it was in Aristotle’s time. Aristotle had flautists and sweets and what? Doric columns? An parthenon? He likely didn’t pay much attention to distraction both because leisure or recreation was more (or differently) limited in his day and, well, the litany of things beckoning one’s ancient and attentive spirit were far fewer than they are at present. If Aristotle had seen, say, Alexander the Great become Alexander the Great at Endlessly Scrolling TikTok he may have been a little more sensitive to and focused on the vagaries of attention and distraction.
But THE AGE OF DISTRACTION is only so distracting and, quickly, our thoughts drifted disappointingly to nothing exactly again. Now, though, we had a new and invasive concern that our writing was less likable and less widely read than Google reviews of graveyards.
Distraction is kind of like boredom. They’re both blunt, durational, and distressing reminders that you can’t control even the most basic, essential part of you. Your mind isn’t really yours even if it’s mostly what you are. There’s also an emotional component that follows along with this realization that you cannot (always) will yourself to be otherwise. Our mood, thoughts, and world as well as our ability to attend to our mood, thoughts, and world aren’t under our control. Both boredom and distraction force us to briefly acknowledge that we’re ultimately only our selves and circumstances and that our selves and circumstances aren’t really or regularly ours to decide.
For us, boredom triggers a kind of squirming escape mechanism while distraction motivates a desperate scrabble. When bored we want to urgently flee the boring thing. When distracted we want some kind of welcoming refuge from the distraction. Boredom motivates a movement away and distraction a movement towards. Recognizing this, we (finally) decided to act on it and move physically towards the 3.9-star cemetery. If nothing else, this would force us to pay attention to the sidewalks and the streets, focus on whatever thoughts or feelings were brought up by this particular place, and - maybe most interestingly - it would prompt us to us consider just how many stars this burial ground truly deserved.
So, then, after being delayed by forty additional minutes of interrupted thoughts and incomplete tasks, we left the house empty-headed. We were hopeful that either a) the 3.9-star cemetery would capture our attention utterly or b) we’d be distracte in a 3.9-star cemetery and be able to turn “distracted in a 3.9-star cemetery” into something that’d capture your attention and/or distract you for a little while.
What happened? Well, you’ll have to pay attention to your inbox on Friday to find out. Don’t get too excited, but that post is probably going to include a cemetery review of sorts. Tell your friends, get hype, etc. etc.
Thought provoking for sure. But is distraction something you learn… a habit, a skill .,,? I know a five year that has not figured it out yet. When she is doing something she stays in the moment and is not distracted no matter how hard I try to get her attention. May that last for a long time.
"(...) sometimes be pulled away from displeasure or pleasure by some kind of “not thinking.” - this whole article sure had me thinking a lot about meditation, many allusions to it as far as I understand the concept of thought and non-thought, as well as distraction, attention and the flow between the two, and especially in the non-patterned observation of this "mind-movement" - fascinating stuff, and for whatever reason not especially emotional for me personally - probs cause I'm a bot