In order to succeed in a hypercapitalist society, we must focus

September 6, 2023 4:33 PM

What is distraction? Maybe it is just the need to be diverted: from the direction you originally set out on, from what it was you thought you wanted to do. After all, to desire something requires projecting yourself into the future—how do you know you’ll still want it when you get there? And along the way there are so many attractions, way stations, spots of time. Even an annoyance can be a pleasure: a fly keeps buzzing around your head while you try to write the next sentence, a ringtone interrupts the movie, and—it’s you. Just this one time you’ve forgotten to turn your phone off. If only the world would stop bothering you, you could finally get down to work. from In This Essay I Will: On Distraction [The Paris Review; ungated]
posted by chavenet (20 comments total)

You really have to give him credit for that ending, cutting himself off before getting to the Julian Barnes novel.

I want to tell him, look, I know we're not supposed to say this, but we were getting distracted long before our phones. Distraction is, and I suppose he is gesturing at this, human and necessary and unavoidable but must be avoided. (Most of us are not getting distracted by fond memories of running away from bulls in pastures.) I thought of Damon Knight's little book on writing fiction, and dug up the quote this reminded me of: "Among the writers I have known, one habitually worked lying down in the dark, in a trailer with its windows painted black, dictating into a tape recorder. Another, when he wanted to think about a new novel, got on a bus to a destination about four hours away--it didn't matter where. When he arrived, he boarded another bus and rode back; by the time he got home, he would have the novel all plotted out. Another meditated about a novel for three months, then sat down in a specially designed cubicle, smaller than a telephone booth, and typed furiously for thirty hours straight. When he came out, the novel was done."

I've always found this a little claustrophobic, and in fact I think I conflated it with another memory--or maybe I'm making this up--that in one of the little essays Harlan Ellison used to do before stories, he told of a writer who dictated while lying under a bed? That's a lot of work to avoid distraction, what with the risk of death and everything. My own purchase of some noise-canceling headphones seems downright prudish by comparison. (But they don't work, how can anybody concentrate when every sound is dulled except the sick pounding of your own heart? What can silence that awful sound?)
posted by mittens at 5:42 PM on September 6, 2023 [17 favorites]

Given there's multiple billion-dollar companies competing to get people's attention and not very much in terms of support for people retaining their agency (or even understanding how to do that), one should expect most people will lose this battle and essentially become whatever the thing that gets their attention wants them to be. This has a few implications for writers.

One, as discussed above, is that the writing process is more difficult for many would be writers, so just finishing a thing puts you at a relative advantage. However, once you've written it you're now competing for people's attention yourself. If you don't have support from an entity that knows how to fight the attention battle and is willing to steer some of their wins your way, you don't have much chance of finding readers.

I hope these orgs eventually make a difference:
https://www.sfsd.io/
https://www.projectreboot.school/
posted by Mr. Gunn at 6:07 PM on September 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

> There’s a kind of comfort in toying with a large body of knowledge, the way in which you can avoid writing a paper by entering a rabbit hole on Wikipedia—beginning on the front page and finding yourself reading about Byzantine dynasties, or non-Newtonian fluids, or Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century. Maybe this activity, even if it never gets us anywhere, is something closer to play. And without it, at least from time to time, we become dull.

uhhh i'm pretty sure the author of an essay in the paris review has been secretly monitoring my Internet activity because this is uncannily specific.

signed,
someone who can tell you all about maximinus thrax, the differences between the principate and the dominate, anna komnene's alexiad, and what makes oobleck oobleck.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:33 PM on September 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

he told of a writer who dictated while lying under a bed? That's a lot of work to avoid distraction, what with the risk of death and everything.

Very curious what form of death you're risking lying under a bed.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:52 PM on September 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Waiting for the Bouvard and Pécuchet reboot where they're YouTubers.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:54 PM on September 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

What can silence that awful sound?

Have you tried floorboards?

I have to disagree with the author on one point: I think finishing a project-- any project-- feels absolutely fantastic. This might be an age thing. You reach a certain point at which you realize that the rare gold, the unusual and satisfying moment, is wrapping something up. Being able to point to something you've made in the past tense. That magic formula, done.
posted by phooky at 7:07 PM on September 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

Very curious what form of death you're risking lying under a bed

Death by cat hair inhalation
posted by aubilenon at 7:23 PM on September 6, 2023 [14 favorites]

Very curious what form of death you're risking lying under a bed.

Monsters, duh!! Just worrying about them getting me when I turn out the lights is a tremendous distraction.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:27 PM on September 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

well, also if you’re under a bed that you have, in your foolhardy indifference to the threat of subcubile abominations, failed to cut the legs off of, then you run the risk of being crushed when someone with more sense comes by and cuts them off for you.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:39 PM on September 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Buddha, Eckhart, and I all teach essentially the same."

-Schopenhauer.
posted by clavdivs at 8:29 PM on September 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

you know i’ve seen that quote before but I’ve always assumed it was a reference to their shared bent toward negative/apophatic theology. what’s the real context?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:46 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Very curious what form of death you're risking lying under a bed.

Everybody knows that you must always tell the truth while under a bed or else it will detect the lie and collapse on you in revenge.
posted by Daily Alice at 4:22 AM on September 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

My approach has always been to indulge every temptation to distraction that comes my way. Otherwise the pressure becomes intolerable.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 4:41 AM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I came across an idea recently that has been pretty transformative: Your entire life is where you put your attention.

Your entire life is where you put your attention.

That really made me re-examine some habits, urges, and priorities.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 5:44 AM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: someone who can tell you all about maximinus thrax, the differences between the principate and the dominate, anna komnene's alexiad, and what makes oobleck oobleck.
posted by ikahime at 8:52 AM on September 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

> Everybody knows that you must always tell the truth while under a bed or else it will detect the lie and collapse on you in revenge.

The truth in an absolute sense? Or merely what one believes to be true?
posted by genpfault at 10:05 AM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've got a detailed response about the nature of human attention that I'm working on but I just have to finish reading up on the history and cultural significance of of hiding-under-the-bed-related fatalities.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:12 AM on September 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

what’s the real context?

I, apologise for the delay. chavenet's threads are like sunshine and iron gall ink, a cross jigsaw word "puzzle" I enjoy which and infrequently jackdaw in in answer to this query, I cannot or will not speak for The Buddha or construe a Sam Shepard like dialogue between The Buddha, Eckhart, and Schopenhauer. Though I'd start with Rudolf Otto. Thus, negative/apophatic theology Is not soley the creation out of nothing orthodoxy circa 12th C. Eckhart, he believed, using the term 'emanation' in something but by the third level, souls working through memory, a higher intellect, a will, I'm really craving the teleological.
posted by clavdivs at 3:08 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Bouvard and Pécuchet, you may think, aren’t exactly distracted. In fact, at times they seem nearly maniacal in their thirst for knowledge. But isn’t the idea that] they are potentially interested in everything a kind of curse, something worse than indifference? As fast as they find a passion, they can be drawn away from it. They are avatars of the societal affliction Flaubert called la bêtise—mankind’s universal stupidity. Their curiosity has no staying power—it’s just the dirty runoff of a Zeitgeist that tells them to improve themselves, improve the human race.

This is the part where it feels like that author has a magnifying glass pointed directly at me and I am burning up like a little ant.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:53 AM on September 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

> Though I'd start with Rudolf Otto. Thus, negative/apophatic theology Is not soley the creation out of nothing orthodoxy circa 12th C. Eckhart, he believed, using the term 'emanation' in something but by the third level, souls working through memory, a higher intellect, a will, I'm really craving the teleological.

well i see someone's been reading their plotinus
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:33 PM on September 14, 2023