Why modern life keeps pulling apart our attention
Why can’t we focus?
Increasingly more, we are all finding ourselves constantly distracted—as C. S. Lewis said, long before the iPhone snapping at us with color and sound and novelty every moment of the day and night: “distracted from distraction by distraction.”
The truth is, as Aristotle recognized long before recent neurobiology caught up, we are creatures of habit, formed by what we repeatedly do, and thus we increasingly cement into the behavior we choose again and again. In light of this recent neurobiology, we now understand we are literally rewiring our brain connections, synapses, neurons. We are build compulsive, easy pathways to the things that we always do, and breaking that cycle is incredibly difficult.
No day of your life is neutral. Not one.
Every day, you choose, and each choice is a tiny brick in the pathway you will continue to walk.
This will either serve you, or ruin your life, in proportion to the seriousness of the decisions.
Of course, this reality applies to many key areas of human experiences and the lives we live, but perhaps most dramatically we are seeing this in the realm of focus, where very few of us can go even a few minutes without checking our phones, leaving them open to our time with our hearts awake to their beckoning—likely even into our sleep time. We have developed a sixth sense for its location to us, like a phantom limb.
How distraction reshapes the brain
I think I’ve been an incredible control to the experiment. While everyone was acquiring their first smart phones into the early 2010s, I was completely preoccupied reading Aristotle on human behavior, as mentioned above, along with Plato, the Church Fathers, modern philosophers, Scripture, and the thickest trenches of Thomas Aquinas.
Yes, this was a great education. But it was also attention practice on steroids. So, while I was absorbed in physical books, obsessively marking up the margins with a pen and knitting the concepts into class discussions and papers, an entire universe of fragmented minds was erupting outside of my immediate circles where everyone was doing the same.
Interestingly, for a good chunk of this time, we didn’t even have WiFi at the residence building. It was my last full experience of the analog world before catapulting back into it all with a vengeance.
I have watched this incredible capacity for attention fade dramatically over the years, but especially after the shut downs and the loneliness that ensued, forcing me onto my phone and laptop all day long. While it was a productive time, it was also a deeply conditioning time which has had the lag effect of addicting me, seemingly purposely, to screens.
It’s very difficult to tear ourselves away from the constant influx of humor, drama, wit, absurdity, strangeness, inspiration, aspiration, critical health information, need-to-know political facts, and much more. These screens seem to hold every possibility we could dream of, and in a real way—they do.
Many of my closest friendships and work collaborators have come via these strange, dictatorial little machines. Many of these relationships have made their way into the flesh and blood space, but many have remained behind the digitized universe we all live in. It’s hard to know what to make of that exactly: yes, I am profoundly grateful for those I know well whom I would otherwise likely not know at all.
But what if the full breadth of the cost is not something I can quite see? In the great mystery of life especially in a mesmerizing digital world, what is the tradeoff?
The slow erosion of the inner life
I am a songwriter and a pretty natural contemplative. I like beauty and ideas and thinking about life, reality, people, everything. I am bursting with creativity and ideas and I am maybe at my happiest in joyful, buzzing solitude. Even with this neutered attention capacity I admit to from the onslaught of recent years, I still do not find it difficult to go and spend days on end at a monastery in silence, away from all screens, for a reset.
And yet I can’t seem to focus like I used to.
I rarely write a song, whereas I experienced songwriting almost as a compulsion in earlier iterations of my life, where a screen was not yet the immediate go to in a moment of boredom. I would finish my work or studies, pause, and think: where is my guitar? How can I encapsulate this strange instinct of melancholy and insight I can feel in body and place it in some form of words and melody?
When I go to write, I can still happily become absorbed—but no longer for the same hours on end that used to come easily and satisfyingly. There is always the siren call of the phone and its charms.
Books, while still holding the capacity to entrance me, often now go unfinished. Prior to 2010, I had never not finished a book, except a couple of stragglers I firmly decided were not worth my time. I never used to just drift from them.
I can feel that, for me, a revival of that previous attention is still in my grasp if I will fight for it, but I realize I came to the game with the odds stacked in my favor: even when cruising social media, I tend to gravitate toward thoughtful accounts that are at least more likely to post something thoughtful, and occasionally draw me into longer form thought patterns via essays or long form video.
And I was always someone with a penchant for paying attention deeply to reality, and then had years of less smart phone destruction paired with intensive formation of my physiological brain a la Aristotelian neurobiology.
And yet here I am, finishing up this article, keeping tabs on my phone one foot away like a kind of vigil, having already checked it multiple times in between sentences.
Reclaiming attention and reality
We can’t focus because we don’t focus. This is the simple answer.
We can’t focus because we continually teach our brains it isn’t a valuable skill to focus, and is thus a waste of energy. Our brains obediently rewire us around novelty and scrolling instead, sitting and “rotting” in our beds or on our couches or hunched over our desk.
But the end result isn’t just a lack of attention, with deleterious effects on our reading habits or ability to work with as much sharpness, effectiveness, and fortitude.
This lack of attention leaks into our relationships, where we start to find the normal experiences of other human beings to be too slow and boring or too anxiety-ridden and stressful. We lose touch with the gradual building of intimacy as a necessary prerequisite to real love, and instead yearn for our digital pacifiers to calm us down, make us smile, and bring us a sense of meaning—no matter how temporary.
Horrifically, and I say that without melodrama, this lack of attention is also correlated with lack of a solid self, tracking astonishingly with what seems to be growing rampant narcissism.
Without attention, cultivated and strengthened daily, we start to lose a solid sense of reality and our place within it. We find our interior life slipping out like sand through fingers, never having a moment to turn into a deeper pool of wisdom, meaning, and truth.
In the past, even the more frivolous souls had plenty of time for the brain to wander into a variety of thoughts: walking, cooking, standing in line. For a long time now we have been adding noise everywhere, but even then, the quiet moments just before sleep were still sacred, and try as we might, filling every moment with distraction was not completely possible.
God could still whisper.
Now, even the most thoughtful people, without harsh application of heroic agency, find themselves completely overtaken by technological distraction.
Unfortunately, many of us have hardened into caverns of habituated action via the neurological mechanisms. But the beauty of what we now understand about neurobiology is that we can always—always—rewire our brains, bodies, and beings around who we truly are and want to become. As Aristotle said, it usually takes some kind of violent intersection to break these entrenched habits, and the science now agrees.
But what’s at stake is not just a sometimes comical inability to stay on task but rather the loss of our very central, true selves. Along with this loss of self is a loss of everything, and, most importantly, the things that drive us continually toward deeper joy and meaning: relationships, thoughtful work, art, music, God.
This lack of focus is, in a bedrock kind of way, the disconnection from reality and what makes us human. Without it, we become some grotesque combination of both animal and machine, rather than integrated body-soul composites made for fullness of life.
We must reclaim ourselves by reclaiming our attention.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 