The deeper crisis beneath modern distraction
I’ve spoken extensively in other pieces about the loss of attention in modern life, and how this leads to both a physical experience of being constantly overwhelmed, as well as a collapse of inner life and the solid self, leading to behaviors which can destroy our most meaningful work and relationships.
But I’d like to speak about something that exists prior to this loss of attention due to many practical angles, something that propelled us into this moment where scrolling and fragmentation of our inner being became, it seems, the only bearable way to live for so many.
It’s the kind of thing where people often roll their eyes at what seems an absurdity, but I’m starting to see a growing consciousness of this in my personal corners of our online, abstract world: essays about how cars have decimated our humanity, how modern progress dating back centuries removed us from ourselves and each other, how loss of the monastic life as template for the human is the whole problem.
This something prior is an existential loss of meaning which could have many root causes that would take dissertations to discuss sensibly: the Great Schism of 1054, the nominalist trend of the late scholastic period, the Protestant Reformation, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the advent of the printing press, the Industrial Revolution.
Perhaps we could or should go back as far as the collapse of the Roman Empire—or even the fall of Adam and Eve.
But to deny that we lost our way at some point, and to say that all of the destruction of modern life is due only to the rampant uptick in recent technology, is to miss something critical.
Technology, distraction, and the vacuum of meaning
The truth is that we first allowed a gaping black hole to form in both our personal inner being and in the collective. There is a vacuum where meaning was, and until that fills corporately and individually, there is room for every kind of poor counterfeit.
When I look at my own life, it’s clear that technology has only filled where I have permitted such a vacuum. I spent my early twenties reading Aristotle and many other civilizational greats in an Austrian summer palace instead of on an attention-commanding pocket internet purveyor. Not only did I not buy an iPhone until extraordinarily late in the game, but in that time, I barely spent any time online at all, despite a previous growing attachment to social media.
My life was chock full—of studies on sun-hazed balconies; of both people I loved and people who drove me mad; of social events with spritzed apple juice and paprika-laden goulash by the 800-year-old courtyard tree the hippies would clandestinely come to siphon energy from; of dances in the dusty “Russian theatre” after a roommate and I would “pre-game” with cheap Ukrainian vodka and berry syrup shots.
Smart phone? The only time I even thought of the one I had with its limited data was when I was trying to find my way back to the train and my geographical processing gene flagged my inability to get there—or the time when I forgot the trains didn’t go late at night and found myself on a dark side street with a friend and nowhere to go.
In other words: only in something of an emergency or pressing need, for which the technology has been a welcome tool.
But my main point is this: if our lives and our hearts are full, technology naturally finds its appropriate, subjugated place.
Meaning, addiction, and the hunger for real life
And so, while modern technology is certainly an impressively powerful thing which demands our virtuous wielding of it, we would be better off focusing on filling up our hearts and time with the fullness of meaning, rather than working at the problem from the other direction.
This expands into even the serious addictions that plague people via these tools, like online gambling and pornography.
I remember reading once that an extraordinarily high amount of soldiers coming back from the Vietnam War experienced a nearly automatic reset on their heavy heroin and cocaine addictions, which had apparently been a rampant coping mechanism to survive what they had been doing and had done to them. The main reason was that few of the men had sought out addiction from a place of persistent inner emptiness; they lived connected, meaningful lives prior to the war, sufficient enough in that regard to at least keep them from the worst addictions.
Upon returning to their families and communities and the activities normative to their previous lives, many of them spontaneously quit the addiction to the enormously addictive drug and never returned to it.
I don’t remember where I found this, or what the exact statistics were, but it stuck with me because it tracked with my experience and the experience of many who come into contact with deeper meaning—through healthy relationships, meaningful work and accomplishment, and, often most dramatically, a deep religious conversion. Many of our worst habits will spontaneously disappear in an almost inverse relationship with this being filled.
Rebuilding attention through meaning and reality
And so the project of our time (aside from the fact that it is largely untenable anyway to completely reject technology or spend all of our time bemoaning its excesses) is not so much as to constantly rag on the technological advancement of our time but to rediscover and rebuild true human meaning in flesh-and-blood reality in physical places and with physical people, deep spiritual and philosophical engagement, a growing appreciation for the arts, and a disposition of gratitude and receptivity to reality.
The result of fragmented attention and meaning can lose its current power source in the same way all kinds of destructive behaviors do: in the presence of something deeper, better, and more compelling.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 