Bored & Distracted
What we think of as distractions aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.
“One of the puzzling lessons I have learned, is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing. I’m not just speaking about leaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish.”
Gregg Krech, in Four Thousand Weeks
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how what we pay attention to is what makes up the reality for us, but that often, we give in to distractions. Why is it so hard to concentrate on things that matter to us? Why do we even feel this discomfort, and flee to something that we don’t want to be doing with our lives instead?
Boredom is the culprit
According to Oliver Burkeman, we give in to distraction because we’re trying to flee something painful about our current experience. It could be physical pain, but more often it is the “mental pain” that we feel when doing the daily tasks - work, study, waiting in line. Your attention isn’t “dragged away” against your will. But rather, you are eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape the discomfort. (Thus you can’t really blame the attention economy for ruining your life. Our role on this battlefield of the attention war is more like a defector rather than a true victim.)
This mental pain, this feeling that the thing we’d resolved to do is so staggeringly tedious that we can’t bear to focus on it for one moment more, is actually a type of boredom. We’ve all experienced the anxiety and depression when we’re bored over an extended period of time. But even in those momentary lapses of boredom — during a work meeting, waiting in front of the microwave, the unpleasant sensation is more than just being uninterested in what we’re doing, but stems from “an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control.”
You might find this too dramatic, but Burkeman suggests that this painful experience that we are fleeing away from is in fact the ruthless encounter with our finitude — the reality that we have limited control over our time. When we try to focus on something we deem as important, we’re forced to face our limits, an experience that feels uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one we value so much. And that’s why boredom feels so unpleasant. All forms of boredom oblige us to face our finitude — that, this is it, whatever experience is unfolding in this moment, we have no control over it.
Distraction feels limitless
So what do we do to seek relief from this discomfort? We distract ourselves. Because distractions feel as though no limits apply. They don’t even have to be fun. Scrolling through your newsfeed isn’t always exciting, but it doesn’t have to. It just needs to make you feel unconstrained.
“You can update yourself instantaneously on events taking place a continent away, present yourself however you like, and keep scrolling forever through infinite newsfeeds, drifting through ‘a realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present.”
James Duesterberg, in Four Thousand Weeks
And this is why anti-distraction strategies such as digital detoxes, web blockers, don’t work in the long-term. They simply limit your access to the distractors, but do not address the urge itself. Even if you turn on airplane mode and put your phone in another room, you can still resort to find other way to relieve the pain — redesigning your to-do list or reorganizing your desk, daydreaming, or deciding that what you really need is to take a nap.
The Secret
So, what is the secret to getting rid of this urge toward distractions, if blocking them out doesn’t always work?
The answer is there isn’t any 🙂
The most effective way, Burkeman suggests, is just to acknowledge that it will feel unpleasant to hold your attention for a sustained time on something that you can’t choose not to do, and to stop expect things to be otherwise. “This unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold” (p.108).
So the next time that you need to get started on a difficult project, rather than chasing feelings of peace or absorption by trying to make yourself comfortable in a perfect setting, try simply acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and turn your attention towards it instead of railing against your reality. And the next time you’re engaged in an unpleasant conversation, rather than surreptitiously checking your phone to avoid paying attention — because “listening takes too much effort and patience and a spirit of surrender, especially when what you’re hearing might upset you”, focus on fully feeling the discomfort. That’s the only way you can liberate yourself against these feelings.
To finish off, this view is in accordance with the Zen Buddhist belief that all of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were doing differently. But paradoxically, the liberation lies in acknowledging that we are not in control of the course of events 🙂
Favourites of the Week:
Read: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1946) - The story of how Frankl survived the concentration camp and how this experience led to his theory on logotherapy — that life is not a quest for pleasure, but for meaning.
Listened: No such thing as a free return by NPR Planet Money - I had no idea that stores for returned goods existed, and that it’s basically a Black Friday every week!
Have a great weekend!
Ingrid
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