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The Evil Problem With Distraction And What You Can Do About It
Throughout our lives, our attention gets pulled away on things we never wanted to focus on, to begin with.
Everything is meant to distract us. To pull every last second of our attention away from the things we wanted to focus on. And being someone who has ADD, I’m in a perpetual state of waiting for my owner to throw the dog ball.
It doesn’t matter how committed you are to making the best use of your time if you always waste it on things that aren’t important to you.
Everything in the “attention economy” is meant to distract you.
As Oliver Burkeman writes, it’s a “giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about.”
There’s no such thing as s free lunch.
Free social media isn’t free because your attention is the product. Products are designed to adapt to your interests to keep your attention captive.
We are “distracted from distraction by distraction,” wrote T. S. Eliot.
