Bree Stilwell

American Individualism, Sacrifice and The Distraction Pandemic

In hindsight—one of weeks, not yet months—the decision seems so petty, goofy nearly. To change my relationship with technology. Like, really change. Stem to gudgeon, as my 93 year-old grandmother still says. Deadly.

And by technology I mean exactly the thing you’d guess, my smartphone and every single sub-portal to distraction it provides.

Our American election broke something loose in me, like a kidney stone but as if passed through the left ventricle. The anticipation of being tethered to the 24-hour news cycle for the next four years, handcuffed to the alerts, each one of them reopening a freshly dug wound, I can’t do it. Not now, not ever again.

We’re in the throes of a Distraction Pandemic, and I’m masking up.

Challenges on our attention are obviously nothing new.

• Epictetus, in the early 2nd century, believed that ‘you become what you give your attention to.’

• William James, to many the ‘father of psychology’, in 1890 that ‘my experience is what I agree to attend to.’

• Thoreau wrote in Walden, circa 1854, ‘‘For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction.”

• , writer, meditation teacher/advocate, very much alive, ‘What you pay attention to becomes your life.’

And for just as long as we’ve recognized the vampirism of attention seeking, distraction as it’s consequence has been identified as a sickly comfort. A syrup-sweet cocktail, masking the dangers of it’s main ingredient with the taste of the innocuous.

It’s of course natural to seek comfort, and to need it. But there is a massive difference between the survival mechanism involved in craving the touch of a loved one and picking up your phone in the middle of a difficult conversation with that same loved one.

Have we become so obsessed with mitigating our discomfort that we can’t manage it’s presence in our lives at all?

The thing is, I have a problem with our complacency slash victimhood. Yes, it’s absolutely true that there are entire teams of massive companies dedicated to maximizing their pull on our attention. It’s all they do, and they’ve literally got it down to a science.

We know this and yet, we allow.

We see the effects in our daily lives, see the warning signs if not the full-blown fires in our kids, are terrified by what misinformation (the weaponization of distraction technology) has done to our global democracies, and yet… we throw up our hands as if there existed no other option.

As I started talking about my plans to further disentangle myself from my own tech, the responses came like carbon copies (though I suppose the proper metaphor here would be ‘like ⌘ V’s’). They were all a version of, ‘Well, good luck with that.’

We know what boredom does for us, that it’s a motivational state. We feel boredom when we’re disengaged from our current experience. That feeling incites a call to action in our brains, to find novelty where it’s lacking in the moment.

There is a point of discomfort involved here though, and it’s that exact moment that those teams of distraction experts are manipulating. The moment of insecurity, our wandering through the interstitial space between knowing, not knowing and then ultimately knowing again, where our attention is at it’s most vulnerable.

So while it’s true that we’re being manipulated by outside forces, discipline is a limitless and completely free resource.

I’ve often been told that I’m particularly ‘disciplined,’ as if it’s a congenital trait, but one also admired… jealous of. Like long legs or a widow’s peak. As often as I’ve been accused of it, I’ve also taken stock of why it bugs me so much.

Unlike the length of a body part or the symmetry of a hairline, the comment relegates a very specific intention to something one can take zero credit for. And that’s a dangerous assumption.

Discipline is simply a matter of training. Of learning a particular skill or behavior through repetition over time. Of being serious about it. Committed.

There’s another beast lurking here too though, and it’s an animal born and bred on America’s open pastures—it’s our cultural abhorrence for any sacrifice that impinges on our personal freedom.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think my 70 year-old neighbor can’t stop scrolling social media in the wee hours because she refuses any restrictions on her constitutional rights. But I do think it’s so baked into our collective consciousness to believe it’s not us, but them, that she’s likely waiting for the folks in charge to do the right thing.

It’s ironic really, that our insistence on choice, in the case of input overload, of constant, unmitigated distraction, is elemental to our inability to reject such an existential threat.

It’s as if we’ve exchanged our sovereignty for apathy… all the choices for none of them. Option fatigue on steroids.

‘It’s too big a problem.’

‘It’s too hard to quit/change/do things differently.’

‘This is just the way things are now.’

What in the actual f*ck is ‘free’ about any of this?

Regardless of who you voted for, where you live, who you’re married to, your gender identification, income level or age, you are not only a consumer, but are also being consumed—by carefully orchestrated and technologically enabled distraction.

Your attention is being mined for profit, the value of which far outweighs any known currency.

This is not conspiracy, nor is it theoretical. We know it, feel it, complain about it, and still we comply. We try hacks and habit stacks, digital fasting and dumb phones. We go cold turkey, but then think that because there are bars on every street corner, drinking whiskey all day must not be so bad for us after all.

The solution doesn’t just live where our smartphones don’t. It lives somewhere inside that individualism that we’ve mutated from, force-fed by our keepers, late-stage capitalism and technological innovation.

We’re pretty clearly reaching the end of the road laid by our American Founders, for good or ill. But there will always be elements of their intentions that translate, that bridge from one version of this experiment in democracy to the next. One of which, in my mind at least, is that freedom cannot be enjoyed without virtue.

Behavior of high moral standards. Of acting in ways congruent with what we believe to be of the greatest good, for ourselves and for others.

Every time we give our attention away, for the simple reason that we don’t care for passing discomfort, we renege on exactly what we say we otherwise want to be. Good. Virtuous. Happy.

The choice is ours. Always.

There are plenty of listicles, essays, hell, whole books on how to change what pulls your attention, and the best ones get at the root cause. I’m not going to do that here, but, for anyone interested, I’m always open to share what’s worked so far for me. You’ve got questions, I’ve got ideas.

So… Do I really think we’re spineless? No. No I don’t. I just think we need to have each other’s backs. This problem, after all, isn’t really about the phones. It’s about changing the reasons why we reach for them in the first place.

LET’S DO DIFFERENT, TOGETHER.