I Got My Attention Back (2017)

A better solution for me is a chrome extension that blocks it for 20 minutes at a time. Long enough to make decent progress and get started on work, but no so long that I resent it and give up.

> The entire city — country? world? — had been infected by a terminal disease, the prime vector of which was memes.

> Simone Weil writes, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Then is the lack of attention the opposite? Does it presuppose fear and hate?

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I think there’s really something to this. I have to admit there have been a number of times I’ve been caught up in something “tragic” on the internet, generally some political battle, and felt like the world was falling apart. But then if I step away from the computer and go for a walk in the nearby park, I see hundreds of people just relaxing and enjoying life, not caught up in the daily trivia. I often bring my kids along and watch them just run and play, carefree.

And I sometimes wonder: if we just turned it all off, shut down the internet, radio, and TV... would we be happier?

I’ve lived through a few long power outages as well, (1 day or longer), and on those days, rather than things feeling dire, things felt light and playful. The neighbors all came out and chatted, the kids all played up and down the street. It was nice.

I realize that our world would not function very well without the mass communication systems that link us together. But I also wonder if something like a scheduled, controlled, power outage every Saturday would be really good for us all.

If this is true, like if you use your phone as an alarm clock, you’re screwing yourself.

BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits walks through this exact example, and spoiler: it’s hopeless unless you physically separate from your phone. The only levers you have to manipulate your behavior are prompt, ability, and motivation.

Your phone prompts you reliably, it’s easy to stay in bed and easy to look at social because your notifications are right there, just move one finger, and you’re motivated at a visceral level to look at social because of that dopamine hit.

The only solution he provides is removing the prompt. Get an old style alarm clock and put your phone in the other room at night.

That daily trivia is mostly useless, because news cycles aren't capable (of willing) of sustaining attention for long. I think the current coronavirus situation in the US is a great example, where the news switched focus to the BLM protests and relaxed the covid coverage despite the issue not being fixed. now they are already moving away from blm even though the issues that sparked the protests are obviously not solved either, and covid isn't any less of a threat than it was before. The same has happened countless times: the focus is not a reflection of important issues because each issue gets only it's 15 minutes of fame.