I'm mostly aware of positive and negative distractions, both of which are basically geared towards getting immersed into anything that's not the present moment or our intended focus.
Part of me believes distractions are inevitable, especially in this modern day world.
I think the more distractions we have now doesn't negate the reality that distractions have always been an "issue" prior to the internet era but I'm not well aware how that played out during that time.
In almost all case, one's attention is tilted or rather condensed towards a small segment of the totality of their immediate environment.
Multiple Browser Tabs
For example, at the time of writing this and looking through the window, birds are chirping around a not too distant guava tree, a cat is comfortably rested on a bench just underneath the same tree and there's a gentle breeze moving through the leaves.
My attention isn't hooked into any of these happenings that are occurring at the same time although I'm distinctively aware of each of them.
I'm simultaneously the observer of multiple streams of reality without being consumed by any single one. Which is like having multiple browser tabs open in my mind, each containing a different aspect of the present moment, yet my cursor remains focused on this writing task.
It's also not like me getting hooked into the bird's morning chirps, for example, will necessarily constitute as a distraction but I'll lose (or pause) my current train of thoughts and start a new one centred around the life of birds which would probably take me to wondering about migration patterns, then to climate change, then to human impact on ecosystems before I realised that I've completely abandoned my original thread of thinking.
Extrapolate this into the whole day and you get what's similar to the concept of death by a thousand cuts but the difference here is one has a thousand unfinished thoughts instead of a thousand wounds.
Some paused thoughts are never resumed as they've been lost in the background. Only new ones can be started which often share a similar fate too.
"Locked In"
I'm leaning more into the idea that this "issue" is more like a feature of our operating system than a problem that needs to be solve.
But it's still a problem nonetheless if one keeps fragmenting their mental energy without ever completing a meaningful cycle of thought or action.
How would it be like if there are no distractions, just pure sustained attention on a single point of focus?
My mind comes with this image of a modern hustler totally "locked in" on securing that bag for months on end, seemingly unfazed by anything else other than the task at hand.
An alternate image that also comes to mind is a hermit sitting at the top of a mountain equally unfazed and with an empty mind.
Between the two, the former is what could be termed a focused distraction, in that the intense concentration itself becomes a kind of tunnel vision that blocks out the fuller spectrum of human experience.
Perhaps, just as limiting as scattered attention, but in the opposite direction.
Sometimes, this is the arguably high cost of actually getting stuff done.
Like a laser fixed on a single point, one's attention burns through distractions, and in doing so, it carves a narrow groove that excludes the richness of the present moment.
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