“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” – Fight Club
I then started a summer camp for people who wanted to be plastic surgeons. Arts and Grafts was very popular.
Distractions.
Blaise Pascal wrote about them in his book Pensées, which is French and means “reflections” and is pronounced “Hamwich” because the French never properly figured out that sounds in words should be connected in some fashion to the letters used.
Pascal was a mathematician, a physicist, and invented the laptop computer, which was initially a plank of wood. In reality, he did some of the foundational work that showed that atmospheric pressure varied with altitude, even has a unit named after him.
Pascal was also a philosopher, and thought a whole bunch about Christianity. This was back before the “let’s get a cappuccino and listen to Pastor Dave talk about why God wants lesbian ministers” type of church, and instead when there were debates on how salvation occurred and if free will was a thing.
Thankfully it didn’t take them too long to clean the kettle out, though they did ask me where I got six gallons.
Pascal wrote: “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries. Yet, it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.”
And, although he’s dead, Pascal was entirely correct. We see it all around us right now.
Distraction is seductive. I remember we were on a family vacation and stopped at a Denny’s® to get breakfast. There was a line, and about 30 people (mainly families) were waiting.
As I looked, every eye was focused on a phone – 30 people sitting next to each other, yet distracted by whatever it was that they were looking at. They had escaped reality, and also escaped talking to each other, almost as if they were addicted to the distractions coming to them over their iPhones®.
In reality, many of them probably are technically addicted to those phones. Much of the internet, even back then, was built on the premise of stimulating dopamine to create engagement with the phone, and not with the world surrounding us.
Such a wonderful society we have to take pills to deal with it. Meme as found.
Were those people worried about their bills, their jobs, or their immortal soul? Nah. They were distracted by flappy bird games or Faceborg™ or InstaChat©. They were allowing the moments of their lives to drain away into that sea of distraction rather than confront reality.
They did have bills. Their jobs sucked. Their immortal soul was in peril. But that’s difficult to think about, so it’s much easier to look at pretty colors and cat videos for ten seconds before flipping to the next infotainment bite. The distraction was total.
Is it any wonder that coping skills have been drastically impacted in the generation raised on the distraction of phones? Kids can’t cope because they’re never forced to confront themselves until the stakes are high. This creates a group of victims.
I hate victims. A lot. They’re whiney and they suck every bit of energy out of the room, like psychic vampires. Oh, wait, I just described The View. Huh.
If you ever feel uninformed, remember that some people get their news from The View.
Absolutely, there are people who are in situations that are far beyond their control. And, absolutely there are people who don’t deserve what fate has given them. However, when I look at people who have self-control, who have looked fate in the eye and said, “Yeah, so what? I’m still standing here, chump,” I feel admiration.
Neil Postman was a professor and writer, but then he died. Perhaps his best-known work is Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in 1985. The Mrs. introduced me to it not long after we met, and I knew she was a keeper. In it, Postman talks about the impact of amusement. Amusement is close enough to distraction for our purposes and both Postman and Pascal are dead, so they can’t put up too much of a fight.
Again, Postman wrote about this in 1985, well before the every distraction, every place, all at once monster of the smartphone appeared. In it, Postman identified television as a drug. If so, it’s a gateway drug like aspirin, and the Internet is heroin.
Part of distraction is that it discourages the formation of complete thoughts. I think at least partially that’s part of the inspiration for this place, since I want to create and bring forth ideas that people might not think about, or might have forgotten in all frenzy of flashing lights, free porn, and distractions of Instabook© and Facegram™.
If idiots could fly, TikTok® would be an airport.
It’s a world where, “Excuse me, I’m talking” becomes a replacement for actual thought and people thinking deeply about issues like old Pascal becomes rarer and rarer. A side effect is that the information we get becomes information we can’t take action on. Want to complain to your congressman? How would you even contact them? How would you get their attention? Hell, getting the attention of an HOA is nearly impossible in some subdivisions.
Instead, you’ll complain to your neighbor.
Worse, though, is the impact that’s happening to our youth. The lesson that bad crap is going to happen to them so they need to learn deal with it simply isn’t taught because they just distract themselves away from the Truth they don’t want to consider. It’s not their fault – their brain is optimized to live in villages, and we distract them with the hardest hitting drug in history: the smartphone.
Failure is an option. And failure is a teacher, but when the teacher is fired and replaced with social media? The lesson is muted or ignored.
I bought a book called “How to Hug”, but it turned out to be volume seven of an encyclopedia.
How did Pascal manage to deal with being a religious philosopher, a mathematician, and a physicist?
I guess Pascal was good at avoiding distraction and dealing with pressure.
failure is a negative word. it is just oopsie daisy, but no stressing necessary to figure out how to deal with it, just say Okie dokie Artichokie
I have seen those families all on their phones. That is just everywhere…. except the retina doctor’s office
Snerk. Just got back from seeing the retina doc earlier this week. After the dilated eyes and the absurdly bright lights (when everything looks magenta, you know it’s bright), yeah, reading is aspirational for a few hours. Or a lot of hours, depending.
OTOH, the chrome yellow pee after a fluorescein injection test is an amusing distraction. Oops.
It’s everywhere. I wonder how a tinfoil lined restaurant would do?
Iggy would not be on The View.
I am convinced distraction will very soon be the least of our problems.
Could be just a couple of days.
Speaking just for me, I find it far more difficult to read complex books or even blog posts, because there is always the siren call of “maybe someone emailed me, or texted me, or commented on a post, or the weather might have changed slightly”. There is so much going on all around us that focusing on anything for long is terribly difficult.
It is. None of this is helping our attention span.
John, I’m disappointed that you didn’t note that Neil had one bad habit. He always pressed the doorbell twice, but only twice.
And owned a “noir” cat nemed Garfield.
Hehehehe!
The youth have been carefully trained to not think. They cannot follow a premise to its logical conclusion. They cannot connect cause and effect. They know nothing, because “You can just look it up!”
This did not happen by accident.
Exactly. The idea of estimating something makes you think about that thing in depth. And if you Google it, well, you’ll just get the same answer everyone else does.
I know a man that is extremely focused. He ignores distractions and can complete huge tasks in a short period of time. I think his gift is due to his experiences in life that involved multiple tasks, short periods of time, a determination to not fail, and his brain hardwiring to adapt. Added to this gift is the ability to turn off the world, and get a full amount of sleep in around four hours.
When I failed as a kid playing sports, I just figured out a way to improve so next time the outcome might change. Usually, it did. All kinds of ways to get the edge.
Back then little TV and no internet of course. I read books, Tolkien, Bradbury, Asimov, Michener, Gary Jennings, sci fi etc. Long slow days spent happily buried in a story, using my imagination. Long concentration periods paid off later during employment and personal hobbies.
That’s a recipe to achieve!
I had some important comment to make on your post today, but it’s slipped my mind somehow. My chess and poker websites beckon. CU…
Hahahahaha!
How did Pascal manage to deal with being a religious philosopher, a mathematician, and a physicist?
Easy, he could spend a whole week, month or even a year focusing on something without being nagged to submit a TPS report.
Yup. TPS reports are evil.
Good piece.
‘In reality, he did some of the foundational work that showed that atmospheric pressure varied with altitude, even has a unit named after him.’
Well dang eh? My unit is named after me too.
Hahahaha!
You wrote:
“Hell, getting the attention of an HOA is nearly impossible in some subdivisions.”
CLEARLY, your HOAs are different than mine. Being so close to Mordor On The Potomac means that in my HOA, the rules are thus: Rules identify things which are acceptable and thus are mandatory. Everything else is FORBIDDEN. And they apparently hire ‘Village Managers/Busybodies’ to listen to all the complains from folks coincidentally named Karen or Chad, and to ensure that everyone in their ‘village’ are in ‘compliance’. I have learned to loathe that word: compliance.
I look forward to moving far away from all other humans – such that if my nearest neighbor has their front yard filled with rusty old cars up on blocks – and old stained refrigerators lining their porch – I wouldn’t care, because it’d be a half hour drive to go and complain to them about it. It also probably means that when I die, they won’t find my carcass for months, or even years – as nobody in their right mind would come out my way unless it was to see if I was dead. It’s extreme, but we’ve gotten so that this is what you need to do to ‘just be left alone’. :-/
(And why yes – I *really* dislike HOA’s in general, and the one for my neighborhood in particular. Why did I move here? Not having ever lived in a neighborhood with one before – the idea of an organization to help keep things neat, tidy, and organized sounded like: “Well, that can’t be too bad, can it?”. Boy, did I learn how even ‘good intentions’ can be misused… :-/
Ever notice how HOA’s are “Karen magnets”? I’ve lived in one HOA and had friends with nightmare stories about their own HOA ordeals. It always boils down to one or two Karen’s in the neighborhood who walk around the neighborhood meddling in everyone else’s business.
Yup, lived in one for two years. Don’t want another, every.
Ther’s a whole world of places without HOAs. Not many without HOs, tho.
Pascal…dealing with the pressure. Brilliant closing!
Thank you! But I could have closed it with Newton standing in a square meter, but he kept wandering off.
I see people pursuing happiness, but mistaking fun for happiness. Mix in a bit of “SQUIRREL?!?!” and there might be some distraction.
And some of the “games” that people play on phones, etc., give them about as much enjoyment as a job.
Got to admit, the best Disneyland trip of my life was with two librarian friends. We packed Georgette Heyer novels so we could read while standing in line. Pure fun.
On the other hand, you gave me an idea for a grant request to enable school hours to be cellphone-free.
And tinfoil walls.
John, I was recently remind (and by recently, I mean last Friday) that I am simply not a multi-tasking person. The only multi-task activity I can accomplish is walking or exercising with music or a podcast in the background. Even that for maybe 30 minutes top. I literally cannot hold two tasks in my mind at the same time. That makes for a less-than promising future career path of course, when the question “Can you multi-task?” comes up and the “Nope” comes so quickly no-one has a response. Ah well, I am getting close to being done anyway.
I might also argue that the other issue that confounds modern thinking is the idea of the new. We are always pressing into the new, the exciting, the yet to be done. True, discovery is partially done by looking ahead, but it is also done by looking behind. Over the course of my life I have read a great many of the classics (including Pensees), but I can assure you one pass is not enough at them to get the full value. Such things require multiple readings to fully draw out all of the concepts (at least for me).
All of that requires both freedom from distractions, as you have set out, as well as the time to do the reading and thinking and acceptance – by others, by society – that such efforts are not wasted simply because we are not “doing” something.
Exactly. And, it requires the discipline to avoid the distractions. I now see why my parents had a cabin with no phone – that was the point.
After the blessing of an EMP, or a CME, the little phone gadgets will not work. Kind of blessing, if you think about it. But when thousands and thousands of people show up at the same place, expecting to get food or water, sans phones, it will turn into carnage. Having spent very little time in normal conversations, they won’t know how to communicate w/o insulting, angering, and goading others into violence. And their limited vocabulary will merit them little, in the way of making their needs known. Lack of regular interaction with others will put them in the place of having no way to interact. The heroin of instant gratification with their cell phones will be gone without a replacement. This electric grid we have is tenuous, and irreplaceable. And we are almost totally dependent on it.
It will be a far simpler time than now. And, perhaps, happier.