Distraction is not the Detraction

My starting question is "Is my brain actually geared for the 21st Century"? If so do we need give people distraction pills so that their brains are more suitable for our century?

Is it possible that our aversion to distraction is because we are not getting the attention? That would be a very sad way of looking at distraction. Can there be intent, purpose and value in distraction? Certainly not in the aim of terrorists who understand media as a tool of distraction way better than any of us do. If we really understood that we would help reduce terrorism, because if we are masters of knowing distraction, it changes the nature of media.

I am pretty clear in my own mind that media is not going to change in the near future, especially since we have not changed, even though the types of media have changed greatly. We have all these new inventions of media but our minds are as staid as they were when Ed Murrow was complaining to the industry that it must do more in terms of quality media. We do have quality media out there, we just have millions of people who still do the same thing.

There is no expectation that as tribal force, that human beings are going to change that much in the future, not as individuals. We may turn the group this way, and then the other way but that is no different to how the band The Who depicted this in their 1971 song "We Won't Get Fooled Again" among which lines are "we know the hypnotized never lie" :

We think the form the music or cultural phenomena that appears is the thing that changes our society but as The Who noted, we change from this form into that form, but we DO get fooled again, and again, and again. If we have not principally changed, all we did was take away power from one group or dominion and hand it over to another. We need more than a distraction from conformity, we need understand our distraction and where leads us personally to. Instead of being led by others, when we actually notice something that has the freshness of something that looks new - then that is a valuable distraction, IF we open that door and the net result of all our individual actions is something greater than the past.

Instead we continue to belabour the point about distraction being a bad thing, when clearly we are here on this LinkedIn space reading this because in this moment we are not working !

The intention then is not how others distract us, but how we utilize the power and energy of intelligently guided distraction and even though my response to some post, on another place on this platform was to present a different view of distraction, it was distraction that got me pouring my heart out about the way this digital thing that I type thoughts into can help me.

The idolatry I talk of is every instance I have seen people superficially thanking someone for telling them what I would expect any person of above average intelligence to understand. That I understand that is why I am OK with this mediocrity, unless it is pouring forth from my soul, drawing me down to a lesser experience and a lesser place than I should be in.

In the same day, I came across an interview with Cal Newport which judging through the comments hardly anyone probably clicked onto, never mind listen, and that is because the link itself was pointing to the wrong podcast and not a single comment pointed this out. Except of course when I came online and as I listened to the podcast, it was brilliant, a moment when there was this firehose of great thinking pouring forth and I was just about keeping up with it, thanks to the button that allows us to go back 15 seconds in the podcast.

PODCAST : Greg McKweon in Conversation with Cal Newport (44 minutes)

The peculiar thing is when we use comments as a note pad like I did above, it upends what people normally do. Cal Newport advocates that if you are running a business to move to laptop and realize the addictions pegged to a smartphone and all the applications that drive people to a distraction that is dysfunctional.

I could also see the idolatry in the comment that placed Cal Newport on a pedestal he most probably has no care to be standing on. The podcast showed me that investing in his book DEEPER WORK is worth a look. How many books speak to things we already know and can agree on - and what does it say about us if we thank people for telling us for the things WE KNOW we should be doing? How can we kick the living daylights out of distraction when we don't even know we are distracted and distraction is not the detraction, it is us.

The reason we need others point out simple and basic things to us is because we are vegetating, not because we are distracted and no amount of focus can help a vegetable mind make this world a better place. We are not serious about our own education. It is great to remind myself that I am not the odd ball in this farmhouse of followers. What irks me is being born at a time when only a few have evolved into a semblance of a 21st Century consciousness. Just because we have digital technology does not make it 21st Century, the mathematics that drives this technology was worked out centuries go, it is only our collective capability to make these old idea live in their new forms we use today.

No matter how far we make our machines better, we are having a really difficult time making our humans better. How can we say we are the future if the person who defined what our generation is called defined it before we were born. Sure the 1960's had something special going, but we don't go back and see what they were actually saying, we just put on the clothes and swing the new fashions - without any care or desire to up our thinking, or soul or even our way of being. Distraction, don't tell me about distraction - it can be a beautiful thing if it is used in a creative manner - to find things we would not otherwise find.

Do we know how Sam Cooke died? Most probably not but we all will identify with his song, as if he wrote this for President Obama or something most recent. We are dealing with the same issues but not the same consequences - one which took Sam Cooke out way too young and thus depriving us a canon of what would have most probably mean more immortal songs. What we know is the hope and feeling it conjures - but it is good to distract ourselves from this romanticism and embrace a little more truth. The kind of truth that has the capacity to individually cause us discomfort and pain. We won't go there because the reality is we have been taught to handle conformity and not to handle distraction. What I am talking about here for my own benefit is how I nurture my own healthy distraction. I need to be less concerned about how distraction hurts other people, when they are in reality, their own worst enemy. If we feed the distraction monster we can either beat it, or join it.