UNRESOLVED MATTERS

Unresolved matter of the day: is uninterrupted attention something we can feel? And how does it feel to work in an industry that constantly optimizes for interruption?

Every week, the bell tolls.
My screen time report is in. I am so afraid to look at it, I chose to open Instagram and distract myself from the evidence of my distraction. I am chronically, medically, almost constitutionally, distracted.

We aren't distracted just because the platforms we use are addictive. We are distracted because distraction is now our culture's dominant operating system.

Not so long ago, being focused was the marker of a great mind.

Now, being reachable, reactive, hyper-aware, culturally current is what makes you a sexy hire. To be fluent in the latest reference, scandal, mood swing, discourse cycle, micro-backlash gives you authority in certain meeting rooms. Not everywhere, sure. But when you're an early thirties brand strategist, it feels like a skill you'd be stupid not to cultivate. You need to know about China-maxxing, the year of the cabbage, Bieberchella. You need to be able to say, yes, I saw it yesterday, of course I have a take.

I don't want to romanticize the past. Distraction has always existed (it obsessed the Stoics). Seneca wrote to Lucilius that the crowd scatters the mind, that we return from the games worse than we went in, more shallow and more addicted to spectacle. He called it a kind of self-abandonment: the man who is everywhere is nowhere.

But something is different now in intensity, volume, the texture, the sheer violence of this constant distraction. The grotesque of the juxtaposition — being distracted by a video explaining how world leaders enable genocide, and right after marveling at a baby bear making his first steps in a Slovenian forest. In the age of distraction, everything is leveled. The horror elbows the puppy, the genocide sits next to donut glazing. The feed does not rank. The feed does not grieve.

The real damage of the Age of Distraction is not lost time. It is lost depth.

Depth of thought obviously, which trickles down to depth of taste, relationships, culture.

How is this all a strategy question and an effectiveness question?

The marketing/advertising bubble is built around the optimization for interruption, which we call engagement. The holy grail. The final boss KPI. This entire system rewards the opposite of everything Les Binet and Peter Field have spent twenty years saying. Brands grow from long, emotional, consistent narratives, built over years of mental availability so that when someone finally needs that product, the brand comes to mind without effort. That is the science. That is how market share actually accrues.

But is this science still relevant, still possible in a culture that has no attention?

Real creativity comes from the ability to recompose tattered shards of thinking and bring them together, slowly, precisely, and for the long run. But what happens when our brains have been made incapable of it?

We are losing concentration, which is leading us to losing our creative power.

Leading us to what I find even scarier: we are losing tolerance for complexity.

This isn't a TED Talk where I'm telling you all this and then selling you this great app that helped me put my phone away. This isn't a life journey where everything is fixed now that I started embroidery and now that I read 10 minutes of Dostoyevski every night to slow down my nervous system. That would be delusional to how embedded this all is.

This is not a self-control problem anymore. It's infrastructural. It's born in our devices, yes, but it now shapes our expectations of each other, our jobs, our aesthetics, even our dreams (can our dreams themselves become fragmented?).

We are not only consuming distracting media. Our sheer being is shaped by it.

Is Homo Distractus our inevitable evolution?

I am a strategist who has made a living off being culturally current. To an extent, I am paid to be distractable on demand. If the whole system I am fluent in is the same system I believe isn't working, then what, exactly, am I selling? I don't have the answer. I am not sure I want it yet.

The bell tolls again next Sunday.