Age of Distraction
Could also be known as the Age of...Squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel!
While some portion of the country believe progressive and moderate politicians drink children’s blood, a magical—presumably—bearded fatherly figure who lives in the sky grants their wishes and a corpulent blowhard who rifles their pockets daily for political donations has the answer to their every woe, the rest of us are just trying to navigate an era where attention spans have been reduced to the lifespan of a fart. If it makes you feel any better while you bumble around making your way through our fragmented reality, at least you’re not as lost as the aforementioned group.
Simultaneously, our brains—which are better suited to the era when we got around on our knuckles as well as our feet—are being bombarded with—predominantly—useless information. Every goddamn waking second.
None of this is news.
But I am here to reassure you that you are not alone.
You are not alone walking into a room and then wondering why you are there.
You are not alone setting down one of your devices, or your wallet, or your purse or your glasses in a place you know is a good, safe place and then have trouble locating it when you need it.
You are not alone in not remembering significant events and where they fall in your timeline.
You are not alone—especially after the lost years of the pandemic—of imagining something having happened more recently than it actually did.
You are not alone asking your significant other where your sunglasses are when they are perched atop your head.
Brain fog is a relatively new catch-phrase being thrown around especially for long COVID sufferers. I’m going to call it SSS syndrome. For squirrel! squirrel! squirrel!
All of our random access memories have reached capacity and they cannot be upgraded. The results of an overstuffed random access memory manifests itself in the previously mentioned examples along with a host of other distracted behaviors. It’s beginning to manifest itself more and more often.
Take emails as an example.
I’ll bet most people read no further than the subject line and—maybe—the first sentence—IF they read the email at all! None of us have time for that. Bullets and bold type and breaking the topic into the smallest bites possible helps, but it’s fighting attention spans that are as ephemeral as dust devils.
But that’s not really new because Americans have long skipped through newspapers by just reading the headlines and maybe the first line. That’s why, at one time, who-what-where-when was supposed to be baked into the opening sentence of every news story. Cable news took care of that quaint tradition.
I read once that, in regards to marketing and sales, three impressions were necessary to attract a potential buyer’s attention. Gauging by the number of ‘impressions’ I’m receiving from politicians from both sides of the aisle, from all kinds of nonsensical products and offers of cheap vacation deals to super spreader states like Idaho and Arizona, the new data must suggest that you need to pierce a human’s consciousness an infinite number of times. Perhaps the data suggests that humans must be impacted continually because nothing is being retained.
Our minds are sieves. Sieves without the solitude you get with the mountain backdrop while you’re gold-panning in the Sierras. Our mind-sieves are jangling non-stop from dawn to dusk while staring at black mirrors.
A friend of mine taught junior high or 6th graders and she asked me once if I had any insight into the lack of mindfulness of her students—especially from the boys. This was during my own video game marathons and I told her I had a pretty good idea what might be on young male’s minds. They were probably spending their waking hours working through their heads how they were going to succeed against troubling game levels, or very difficult “bosses”—which are exceptionally hard-to-defeat enemies in video games like World of Warcraft, or what moves they’d need to vanquish opponents on the “battlefields”.
Assuming, of course, they weren’t just playing some game on their phones while sitting in the back of the classroom.
Video games are just one way distraction has soared.
What about the 55 plus inch monitors we have dominating our houses’ interior landscape?
What about the numerous online devices chirping incessantly with notifications and messages?
What about the hundreds of streaming channels and an endless supply of content?
What about news, or blather masquerading as news, worming it’s way into our consciousness like never before?
I don’t have any answers and—obviously—all of these things are double-edged. None of us would want to voluntarily return to the days before there was this intense interconnectivity. There are too many time-savers, too many opportunities for revelatory experiences, too many convenience factors.
Still I’m going to preach intentional separation. For your own sanity.
River trips are how I intentionally disconnect and, the greater the length of the trip, the better. The Colorado through the Grand Canyon, anywhere from 14 to 60 days (though to do the 60-day trips you have to be willing to put up with a mere two hours of daily sunshine, sub-freezing temps and frozen water buckets all while rafting a 48 degree river!), is the best option I can imagine. But there are many other ways to find momentary serenity.
Take a walk without your device.
Meditate somewhere without the possibility of being disturbed. (You can also just sit and do nothing which I—personally—have mastered!)
Bury your head in a book.
Use a stand up paddle board to venture into the middle of a placid lake bereft of motorized vessels—if such a place exists in your region—and drift.
Turn off notifications. Turn off sounds. Turn off your phone.
The idea is to turn off your brain. At least the part of the brain mesmerized by 1s and 0s. You may think that sleep would be sufficient to clear your mind. Five to eight hours of snoozing should be enough. But I don’t think that’s the case. You need to be proactive to separate from today’s technology. That’s why, of course, there are 12 step-like programs and silence retreats to deal with our digital addiction. (Search “silence retreats” and see how many options are available to you. Be ready to open your pocketbook.)
It’s bad enough we have to live in the world awash with chemicals and additives and pollutants that undoubtedly mess with our body’s chemistry. I’ve been thinking about that for decades. You can’t run a study on what all of that shit in combination does to our internal architecture.
So, we’re the guinea pigs.
We live in a society where Viagra—as well as other drugs—can be found in our streams and caffeine is so ubiquitous in Puget Sound it can’t be utilized to isolate other pollutants.
We must control what we can control, so…”Squirrel!”
While I’ve been writing about our distracted lives, y’all have—no doubt—been intellectually embroiled in the latest societal bombshell emanating from the highest court in the land that was once considered to be more impartial than not. I don’t have any good news to share about it, but this article from Seattle columnist, Danny Westneat, might pique your interest.
(Let me know if you can’t read it, but would like to read it, and I will send a copy.)
Also, a palate cleanser.
