How easy is it to be distracted with everyday life?
This thought first came to be years ago when watching "Inception" with Leonardo DiCaprio. It's perhaps my favorite movie of all time due to being extremely interested in dream states as well as the blurring of reality. I realized immediately after finishing the movie, I was captivated enough to finish it without looking at my phone, that I looked at my notifications and was taken away from the movie. The movie had finished and I was thinking about how groundbreaking it was when suddenly I was no longer thinking about it 30 seconds after it had finished.
After this instance, I made it a personal goal of mine to live in the moment more often. I have and will write about the importance of this frequently. The most important part in changing my ways is to stick with a thought or moment before being distracted.
As I began to pay attention to this more, I noticed how often other people were distracted. If you go to a concert you will notice how quickly concert goers get distracted from the performance by a text (sometimes excusable due to a number of reasons) or to post a snapchat video of the concert. First of all, no one and I do truly mean no one wants to watch a 10 second video of a concert that you can't even hear what is going on. Secondly, you're missing what you paid for. If you live in the moment you will not have to watch it at a later date, you will be mesmerized by it for a long time.
When we're touched by something, we now have the ability to come out of it in an instant with a notification or social media addiction, not allowing the thought/moment to fully come to fruition. We live in a world where we can pause and rewind the television if we miss something due to a notification.
Looking back I remember how one of my best friend's in high school used to get on me all of the time for not paying attention. We would be somewhere, watching something, eating, etc. when he would begin to talk to me and I would not respond. This happened frequently. I was so caught up in the addiction to my phone that I was incapable of responding due to my lack of attention. I realized later in life how frustrating it must have been for him that I treated him as if he wasn't even there.
Ask yourself when the last time was that you were able to do a task without being distracted. For me, it is when I am writing, which I have to do at night. It took my time in college to develop the discipline to sit down and not respond to any outside stimulus while writing. This is when I realized that I had to do it at night due to being less distracted of the day ahead of me and most are asleep, so they can't distract me. I tend to write between the hours of 10PM-1AM, sometimes a little earlier and definitely most of the time later (it's 12:38AM right now). I tend to listen to music softly (personal hatred of silence), but it can't be new music. It has to be music I know almost all of the lyrics to so that I won't analyze them and a beat I'm familiar with.
Back to distractions. (Ha, get it?)
Distractedness nowadays comes mostly from our cell phones due to them being a serious addiction. Most feel like something is missing without it in their hand. The world we live in is one where we strive for notifications including likes, shares, retweets, favorites, etc. that gives us an instant hit of dopamine due to instantaneous gratification of approval from others. Don't believe me? 1. Post a picture of yourself and don't look at how it performs for an hour. Difficult? 2. A ton of people delete their pictures or posts because it didn't perform how they wanted it to. An example would be a selfie that didn't get enough likes on Instagram. Oh the humiliation. The striving of self approval by outside approval.
Social media has changed our lives forever. I am by no means an expert, but I do web based marketing as my full time job. When you can see what anyone in the world is doing at any instant, it changes how you respond and think. We want in on trends, but only if we're first.
We can watch literally anything on YouTube in a matter of seconds. The temptation to do so is a blessing and a curse. Without YouTube it would have been extremely difficult for me to learn how to do a lot of this. The curse comes when we don't have to have a conversation to learn to do anything.
Distractedness has become such a problem in the world that major publications, such as Huffington Post, New York Times and the Harvard Business Review offer an anti-distraction guide so readers can become more productive in their daily lives.
We don't have to pay attention for a prolonged period of time anymore. Over a decade ago if you were assigned a book to read, you prayed that there was a movie you could watch that would lay it out nicely. Within the past decade you can get the synopsis of millions of books that takes 5 minutes to read, thus not even opening the book. You don't have to sit down and read a whole book anymore. When's the last time that you read a book cover to cover? But then again why would you? You can watch a thousand 'fail videos' in the time it takes to read a book. I do however recommend reading. We need creative minds to have the ability to make a living. Anyways, reading is a great exercise to become less distracted as well as to find an escape. You have to really focus on the words the page (or these words right now) to get the message. Get lost in the moment. Escape for as long as you can. Bon voyage mes amies.
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