Our attention is finite
Our attention is finite
Source: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-06-25-knowledge-presence/
Why do we need to focus, anyway? What is the reason for being present? Why not allow ourselves the apparent freedom to wonder away and pursue everything that comes our way?
Quite simply, our time is finite. We only have a few hours each day during which we are productive and can stay active on a given task. In the grand scheme of things, we have but a few years to live. Our humanity makes it impossible to experience what the world has to offer in its totality. We must learn to pick and choose among the innumerable stimuli that affect us and trigger us into action.
Everything out there has an effect on us. The colours, the figures, the sounds, the ideas we have about them or because of them. Everything. By being in the world, we necessarily are contextualised. Who we are and what we do is framed, informed, influenced, conditioned, or otherwise determined by all those magnitudes, large or small, that apply to us. We cannot understand our presence in a vacuum, in some notional state of nothingness where we exist as a decontextualised mind, or conscience, or soul. To be, is to be part of the Cosmos.
Action and reaction, the very idea of a feedback loop, implies language. Something happens, which we can describe as the transmission of a message, and something else occurs in response to it, which may be the reply to this message. In its most basic form, this universal language is binary. As we know from computers, binary language builds gestalt forms of incredible complexity and detail. Do not underestimate how the seemingly trivial mechanism of cause and effect leads to elaborate structures.
As humans, we have mechanisms for processing and filtering this cosmic language. A lot of what happens to us never even registers in our conscience, such as how exposure to sunlight helps our body synthesise a certain vitamin. It has a profound effect on our organism, yet we do not actively engage in its making through our purposeful actions.
Other mechanisms of ours involve conscious participation. This is the part of the universal language we do interpret. It is where we can implement changes and work towards improving ourselves. Consider, for example, the case where you are sitting somewhere and after a few seconds you pull out your smartphone to check for status updates. There is no pressing reason to do it. You already checked your phone a few minutes ago. Why do you have this seemingly irresistible urge to take your focus away from your surroundings and shift it towards that mini computer of yours? Can you spend five minutes without that gadget? Look around you. Is the decor good enough? What are your thoughts about its prevailing colours and patterns? Would you change them? How?
The point is to admit that your attention span is finite. If you constantly get drawn away from the moment by your avatars, you will not have enough time for activities that can enrich your life. A meaningful conversation. An evening of reading. A hike in the nearby mountains. These can be fulfilling only when you partake in them wholeheartedly. Imagine forgetting what you just read. Not nice, is it?
If you do not become considerate about how you use your time in those aspects you do control, you can never gather the energy to stay focused on what you want to do in the moment. There will always be some distraction denying you of anything profound. You shall then remain confined to superficialities and be left with that feeling of emptiness.
To be clear, we cannot avoid all distractions simply by using our brain. It is not enough, at least not without intense training. There are many types of stimuli which take the form of an addiction: we can’t just unthink them and move on. Addiction requires therapy, which always depends on the specifics of the case. In general though, when we find that something has a physical pull on us, we must try to disempower it by not giving in.
As a first step, we can escape from those impulses by removing ourselves from their reach. Is your smartphone the source of your distractions? Shut it off and seal it away for an hour. Give it to a person you trust and ask them to leave the premises with it. Do not take it with you everywhere you go. Try to impose a schedule in your daily life where you disconnect from the Web, literally and figuratively. Do whatever it takes to put a distance between yourself and the source of your distractions. Once you learn to live without them physically, you will gradually practice how to control yourself mentally.
Parrhesia here means that we do not deny the fact that stimuli have an effect on us. Remember that we are always subject to the cosmic language. Lying or pretending does not solve the problem. Parrhesia is to admit the potency of those magnitudes and seek ways to deny them the space they need to grow inside of us. Do not assign value to them. Refrain from becoming invested in them.
Just as we are not attached to our own narrative of self and the aspirations associated with our projects, we must practice not to be governed by those dependencies either.