The Tyranny of Distraction
Choosing to be real in the age of the virtual
Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!
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For a few days last week, my wife was away at a training session and I was alone with our kids at the house. When they went to bed the other night, I was tired, but not quite ready to sleep. So I pulled out my laptop and I began to check in on what was happening in the world.
Or at least that’s what I told myself.
Instead, I found myself doing the endless scroll so familiar in our modern world.
Watching a few seconds of an Instagram reel, then scrolling past to another, then another, then another.
I watched a prankster with a clipboard perform a field sobriety test on a fast food worker. I watched a man approach police officers and ask them to check if he had any outstanding warrants. I watched a guy at what is apparently the Brigham Young University dining hall set up shy coed students on blind dates. I saw disembodied, one minute clips of jokes from sitcoms I’d never watched or movies I didn’t know.
I wasn’t particularly enjoying the content. These weren’t videos that I would necessarily opt in to watching on my own free will. They seemed to be just engaging enough to hold my attention and get me to stay on the platform and keep scrolling.
I did this for maybe 90 minutes or so before I finally peeled myself off the couch and forced myself to go to bed. I’m not a big gambler, but I can imagine this is the feeling people get from a slot machine: not exactly a fun time, but it’s hard to walk away when there’s that strange, sinking feeling that maybe the next pull of the slot arm (or press of a button or touchscreen in more modern machines) could lead to the jackpot.
As I was heading up to bed, I was a bit angry with myself because that 90 minutes spent scrolling and half-consuming garbage content is time that I will never get back and it’s time that I could have been doing something productive. I don’t even necessarily mean planting trees or cutting plastic debris away from baby turtles. I could have spent that time reading, writing, or even watching a film.
When Ben Napier was a guest on the podcast last month, he and I talked about the diminishing returns of modern social media. I remember the excitement in the early days of Twitter when it was easy to strike up a conversation and make a connection with just about anybody: network executives, celebrities, niche authors, professors, or just random somebodies who happened to share a similar interest or sensibility.
Twitter truly was a place where it seemed like connections could be made and relationships fostered. I’ve said before that were it not for social media connections, I suspect the first dozen or so episodes of my podcast would have been much different.
But that was then.
These days, our social feeds seem to be less about connecting us with people who have shared interests, or even with the people we’ve chosen to follow, then it is about showing us what the mysterious algorithm thinks we should see.
That algorithm seems more tuned to the McDonald’s drive thru or bag of Doritos variety of content than the chef-prepared meal in a nice restaurant. In other words, we are being fed cheap, easy to consume content that doesn’t really satisfy much in us but still has some addictive quality. It fills hunger in a very literal and basic sense, but it doesn’t really satiate.
Increasingly, it feels like this is not some flaw in the system, but rather, it’s how it is all intended to work.
There’s a disembodiment to watching social media and other short form video content these days. It allows us to feel connected to others without actually doing any of the work of building relationships and creating community.
Even though the algorithm seems to suppress a lot of political content, it seems to show just enough and encourage just enough interaction to make people feel like they did something. Why protest or boycott or fight for change, when you can just like a post and feel like you took action?
These are challenging times, and the only solution that I can think of to fight against this tyranny of distraction is to lean in to reality.
Texting or emailing somebody directly is better than using social media. Talking on the phone is better than texting. Zooming or FaceTiming is better than just a call. Meeting face to face and talking is better than a Zoom call. Meeting as a community is better than meeting as individuals.
This may take some effort and work. But it’s worth it, and it’s laying the groundwork for a solid, dependable community.
It should be increasingly clear that our government won’t save us and neither will capitalism. The security of our jobs, our finances, and our futures is an illusion designed to keep us spinning on the hamster wheel, locked in a cage designed to enrich the wealthiest and most powerful.
The antidote to that? Mutual aid. Community.
Mutual aid sounds complicated, and it can be the deeper you get into it, but at its core, it really just means being human and looking out for one another.
You can participate in mutual aid right now. Cook a meal for a neighbor. Watch somebody’s kids for them. Give somebody a ride who needs it. Grow your own food and share the harvest (even a small herb garden on a window sill). Donate old kid’s clothes to somebody you know who will fit in them, rather than send it to a donation bin or thrift store where it could end up getting shipped to the Global South to join a landfill of discarded, toxic textiles. (I have a whole podcast episode about that)
And yes, make phone calls. Check in on one another. Have real, face-to-face interactions. It doesn’t need to be about politics or anything revolutionary. Start by talking about the weather. But make eye contact and be present. Who knows where it will lead?
Realistically, is any of that happening in the 90 minutes I wasted before bed last week? Probably not.
But even then, the better choice may have been to read a book. Literally any book. Or watch a film or a documentary.
It doesn’t have to be heavy stuff. Any book. Any film. Anything but social media.
As
in my recent podcast episode with her, books, movies, and other forms of physical media may start to disappear and be inaccessible in the future.With that in mind, I went to a book sale over the weekend and picked up a giant bag of used books.
One of them is titled America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink, published in 1990 by historian Kenneth M. Stampp. It’s a book that seemingly has nothing to do with the times we live in about how the events of 1857 ultimately led to the American Civil War.
I’m only about 30 pages into the book now, so I’m not necessarily endorsing the book or saying it’s worth your time. It happened to be on the table at the book sale, and something about it spoke to me. But even 30 pages in, it’s already an instructive read about living in a divided nation. Our nation.
Except this isn’t like 1857.
Back then, the Republican Party was only about a year old, yet had come surprisingly close to winning the presidency in 1856 on a position of abolishing slavery. But there were also several other parties vying for attention, including the Democrats (who swept the Presidency, House, and Senate in 1856), Whigs, North Americans, Free Soilers, and Americans. There was the violent beating of Senator Charles Sumner on the U.S. Senate floor with a cane in 1856. And this is all just in the first 30 pages!
These days, politics take place in the background while we distract ourselves with scrolling. Or we put ourselves out there on these platforms. We are both the product and the customer, yet the people making the money from our work and our time are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
I’m ready to start seeing these platforms for the distraction that they are and lean more into what’s real. How about you?
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Excellent read, really hitting on what's happening around us. We really are getting sick of the slot machine and the more people wake up from the matrix, the better. After reading Nicholas Carr's "the shallows " all about what the Internet does to our brain (published in 2010 but it's just so apt for now) it's shocking the detremental effect of computers, screens, smart phones and social media do to our attention, intellengence and brain. Spending time on these things make changes on a cellular level and it isn't good! Keep up the real world fight 😁👍
Agreed!