Author Robin Sharma got me thinking how doom-scrolling and other aimless fluffing around with leisure-tech is not primarily stealing our time. Let’s face it, those of us who remember life before computers and mobile phones know we’ve never been short on ways to lose time. We just wasted time in more boring ways, like staring at the tele, the walls, or maybe the sky.
Time management wasn’t necessarily better, was it? It just had different challenges. I think that ‘abuse’, mindless use, or over-use of tech erodes our ability to focus. It can suck away our mental and emotional attention, which is more serious than stealing our time.
Feeling unfocussed and distracted tends to be de-motivating, deadening, uninspiring, and can exacerbate flatness, even depression. It’s crucial that we prioritise teaching the value of being able to focus attention. We need a public health campaign about practising focussed attention, like we have for maintaining heart health.
Focus is vital in intelligence and creativity, and it’s emotionally necessary too. Having the ability to focus and hold our attention pointedly helps us commit, achieve and complete - all of which help us feel content and satisfied - eudaemonic - emotionally healthy.
Conversely, distraction, lack of focus, inability to commit to tasks and complete them - tends to breed the worst kind of dissatisfaction - unhappiness with ourselves. Attentional issues are emotional issues too.
We get to know and like ourselves more when we can trust ourselves to focus on things that matter, complete them, hold our attention on one thing at a time when we want to.
Attention may be one of the greatest and most endangered human capacities, alongside empathy. That isn’t the fault of technology. Technology’s wonderful. Like everything - it’s all about how and what we choose to consume, isn’t it? Life’s all about choosing where to place our attention.
Love to you,
Doing nothing is essential to finding balance in a life. Mindless using of social media etc., is not doing nothing, quite the opposite. How do you build yourself, construct your set of values, know yourself if you are constantly online, looking out instead of in? The inward contemplation that comes from spending time alone without being on a phone/device, is so important, and I fear there are many young people, say under 24, who spend no time just staring at a wall or out a window. Example, young people love to blow off anything that happened 'before my time', yet if they put down a device and investigated history they would realise the error of choosing ignorance. There! I am an old curmudgeon aren't I. No I'm not, but my perspective around personal growth in a time of IT overkill gets confused by the lack of curiosity coming from people who spend so much time on a device. Free the World!!!! :) x