I Lost My Ability to Focus

I’m curious about focused attention. Like a laser. What would my life be like if I was able to actually declaw my phone and only pick it up when I was fully aware of what I wanted to do with it and for how long.

Sometimes when I pickup my phone it feels specifically designed to splinter and defuse my attention. It feeds me one small bite after another of this and that, every tiny video built to capture my attention with an opening hook “This is the one dumb thing that changed everything for me.” “This is what they don’t want you to know.” “I bought this new kind of chocolate and after just one bite my girlfriend cna’t keep her hands off me.” “These five foods you’re eating are making you fat.”

It’s relentless and once I finally pull myself away I feel exhausted, harvested, spent. Sometimes when I am riding the metro I look through the car and every single head is tilted over looking into their phone and I wonder where this is taking us.

It feels like a sort of arrested development. It also feels like a gradual drifting away from the very essence of what it means to be human. We have completely lost both our ability to use a paper map and to trust our intuition to find the pathway to our destination. How many times has google maps me the extra long way around or to the completely wrong destination all together?

I know it’s not just me. I know that there are others out there like me who are spending less time on their phones, people choosing to take their power back and discovering a new kind of freedom as a direct result.

I don’t think this is a sort of all or nothing kind of thing. I don’t know about you but what I’m personally after is a special kind of smart phone vigilance. I want to be able to dive in and then come back out again at will with good, meaningful content. I want to find myself eventually immune to the kind of autopilot drift that used to be able to capture me and not let me go till I was feeling vanquished and numb because important aspects of my nature where drained away while I was distracted.