Over the last 6-8 months I have been reading Stephen King’s book “On Writing”. It’s very inspiring and presents the craft of writing with clarity, wit, and humor. Despite how entertaining and engaging it is I have been sloooooooowly reading it with huge gaps of time in between readings.
I routinely reflect on how our digital age has rubbed out our ability to concentrate and focus but I hadn’t thought much about how it had robbed me of activities I used to really enjoy.
It turns out reading carefully and methodically is one of them.
Having experimented with meditation in the last few months I noted that exercising my parasympathetic nervous system gave me pleasant sun-dappled glimpses of the pre-internet layers of my mind and personality.
I really like that guy.
Sadly though, the highly distracted and unquenchably silly part of my mind that has been strengthened by digital devices, on-demand entertainment, and the high-calorie novelty had taken too much control of my attention.
Enter Covid-19.
Three weeks into the nightmare days of the 2019-2020 pandemic (I wonder what we’ll be calling next year) junk-food entertainment was starting to lose its the ability to distract me. Digital junk-food that had been effective addiction-hits were now having no effect.
I started impulsively housecleaning, which provided me some satisfaction.
I started reading books again and I started to slowly feel some realness creep back into my mind. I started feeling a sense of my old self.
I had been recently inspired by a Darren Hardy lecture on digital addiction and work focus. This had started me thinking about how I might build my focus back up to where it had been in the past.
In my teenage years, I had built up the ability to paint, draw and compose music for hours and hours on end without interruption. I used to read for hours without interruption.
Even in my 30s and early 40s while hobbled by undiagnosed sleep apnea, I was able to improve in my painting, do focused work and create music I was reasonably happy with. This was DESPITE being mercilessly dragged back into patterns of distracted behavior by the dopamine hits of digital media.
With the world around us rapidly reconfiguring itself into some unknown future, there is no room for distraction or addictive behaviors.
I’d like to build-up my concentration and creativity in a productive and pragmatic way for the rest of my life. I would like to stop allowing the spirit of the times to set the baseline strength of my attention span. I would like to be able to leverage the compound effect of regularly focusing on things that deserve attention and blocking out the things that just undermine the thing that makes us feel human.
I’m writing this in a more-or-less public way, perhaps to inspire others to take a hard look at their diminishing attention spans and waning patience.
OK, back to work.
