Distraction

This Moment That Is Slipping Away

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Some lines stay. Some lines stir. A few quietly rearrange the furniture of the soul.

This one does not shake the house. It simply opens a window.

“The melody, a familiar current, pulled me instantly into the salt spray of a past self, revealing the sharp, inexplicable distance between who I was then and the present silence.” — Albert Camus

Songs from your wonder years always do this. They sneak up on you. No warning. One bar, and you are no longer here.

You are back in a room with an old 2-in-1 Panasonic tape recorder. Slightly temperamental. The eject button needed persuasion. The shelf above it carried a mélange of cassettes — handwritten labels, some spelling errors, all confidence. There was a particular smell in those rooms. Spices. Paper. A hint of ambition. Friends leaning in. Someone always claiming superior taste in music. Windows open to a world that felt large and somehow still manageable.

You remember the small-town ease of it. The presence.

And then you look around now. The devices are thinner. The music is cleaner. The storage is infinite. The shelf is gone. The room has changed. So have you. Scrolling, infinitely.

Nostalgia is a peculiar accountant. It tallies what was gained. It also, without fanfare, tallies what slipped away while you were busy refreshing screens.

A song does not merely remind you of who you were. It introduces you to the distance travelled.

The Thief in the Room and the Myth We Bought

There is, of course, a small device-shaped problem.

The phone. Eternally present. Faintly glowing. Always with something more urgent to offer than the room you are actually in. I have, on more than one occasion, reached for mine mid-conversation — not because anything important was arriving, but simply because the hand has developed its own ambitions.

It has successfully convinced an entire civilisation that the present moment is somehow insufficient. That whatever is happening here needs to be supplemented, checked, or at minimum photographed for later.

The other great lie, sold with equal confidence, is multitasking. The brain can hold one thing at a time — what we call multitasking is simply rapid switching between tasks, getting slightly worse at each of them, while feeling impressively busy throughout.

I have attended meetings in my head while being physically present in other meetings. The results were about what you would expect.

Neither of these revelations is new. What is mildly embarrassing is how consistently surprising they remain.

The Archivist Is Already at Work

Right now, something ordinary is happening around you. A voice in the next room. A cup placed on a table. A small irritation. A smaller delight. It feels entirely forgettable. It is not.

This, too, will one day be a melody. It will carry some future version of you back to a self you cannot yet imagine missing.

Bryson would probably note that memory is a slightly unreliable archivist with a fondness for soft lighting and selective omission. He would be right. But even unreliable archivists preserve something true. Something with weight.

So perhaps the only sensible response is to live this moment fully enough that it has something to give back later. Not as a performance. Not arranged for a photograph. Not in pursuit of the brief dopamine flicker of approval.

In the texture, instead. The awkwardness. The unfinished conversations. The imperfect furniture of today. The neighbour who burnt his bread and somehow let the whole floor know without making a sound.

You never know what the archivist will choose to keep. Or when a stray tune will pull it back out into the light.

Let it have something rich to retrieve.

A few days after these thoughts had been circling, Haresh Chawla wrote something on Founding Fuel that arrived like a companion piece. He approaches it from the other direction — not what memory retrieves, but what we keep deferring. The two ideas sit in quiet tension: anticipated memories pulling us forward, selective nostalgia pulling us back. Both, in their own way, are exits from the present. The destination, though, is the same.

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On a related thought — The Leisure We Forgot

A Small Defence Of Thinking

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There is a newsreader on television. Serious desk. Serious lighting. Serious voice.

A small slip of paper is placed on his desk, marked as a bulletin, the kind that usually signals something important.

He does not read it privately.
He does not check what it says. Or whether it makes sense.

He looks into the camera and announces, with grave authority:

“I have just been handed a bulletin. It says… I have spinach in my teeth.”

He reads this with the same tone he would use for an earthquake or a national election.

No pause.
No flicker of self-awareness.
No sense that this is private, trivial, or frankly not news.

A bulletin arrived. Therefore it must be read.

The process has been followed perfectly. The thinking has been politely excused from the building.
It is a neat little example of what happens when process runs without the application of mind.

That was Ted Baxter, a character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a popular American sitcom from the 1970s. He was written as vain, sincere, and spectacularly literal. The joke worked because the world recognised him. He felt familiar.

When the World Starts Acting Like Ted Baxter

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere.

There is the automated apology email that arrives instantly and means nothing, like a sympathy card signed by a printer. There is the birthday reminder that replaces memory with a balloon emoji and a sentence that could be sent to your plumber. There is the form that listens very attentively and then explains that your problem does not exist in any of its drop-down menus. And there is the student who becomes excellent at passing exams without ever becoming particularly good at understanding anything.

In each case, the ritual is intact. The motion is correct. The meaning has quietly slipped out through a side door.

And then we scale this up and call it management.

The engagement survey is launched with much ceremony. People answer honestly. The dashboard is generated. Colours are admired. A number is announced. Everyone nods. Nothing changes. The organisation did not want insight. It wanted a temperature reading — preferably one that does not require treatment.

Organisational and Individual Goals behave in a similar way. What can be counted slowly begins to matter more than what counts. People learn how to hit the metric rather than improve the work. Throughput goes up. Quality goes sideways. Edge cases fall off the map. The system congratulates itself for success and sends an automated thank-you note.

The bulletin has been read. The spinach remains.

A Small Defence of Thinking

Systems are very good at repeating things. They like things neat. They like things predictable. They do what they are built to do, and they do it reliably. Over time this gives us tidy processes, friendly scripts, clean dashboards, and a lot of activity.

Meaning needs something else. It needs attention. It needs someone to notice what is actually going on and respond to that rather than to the checklist. It needs a small pause before the next step.

You can see the difference in people. Some are fully in what they are doing. If they are cooking, they are cooking. If they are listening, they are listening. If they are working, they are actually at work. Being around them feels steady. The moment feels real.

Others are doing one thing while drifting through another. Replying while half replying. Listening while half listening. Living while half being there. Attention gets spread thin across too many places and leaves very little behind anywhere.

The application of mind is simply paying attention before acting. It is the moment where you ask, “What is really going on here?” It slows things down a bit. It also saves you from doing the wrong thing very well. Application of mind while reading the bulletin turns out to be a good place to begin. In a world full of scripts, the application of mind feels like a small, quietly brave act.

Distraction

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It was evening. The still waters of Charlotte Lake were didn’t seem to care much about the Sun who was running away behind the hovering mountains.

Languid tourists with cameras, Kanda Bhajjis and sugar cane juice walked about trying to catch the sun for Instagram.

I walked away. After getting somewhere, I walked further to a place where I could be left alone with Charlotte lake. Almost as a reflex action, my hand cradled the phone and clicked a picture. It was when I examined what I had clicked, that I first saw him. In the frame. Sitting there and soaking up Charlotte Lake and its silence.

He sat there alone.

He did nothing. Just sat there. Motionless.

I put my phone away and watched him and Charlotte lake. He didn’t seem to care. I am not sure, if he even noticed. He sat still.

In a world filled with distraction, just sitting without doing anything is a rare sight. Here was someone who seemed to just do it! I put my phone away and immersed myself in watching him watch the still lake.

I don’t know how long we both did what we did. Suddenly, the mountains and fading light announced that the night was in. He didn’t seem to be bothered. But I had to get back. It was a bit of a trudge.

And as I walked back, I thought of him and his ability to just focus only to realise, I had done the same as well. I had put everything away, to focus on him.

A Culture Of Distraction

A couple of days ago, I chanced upon, Ted Gioia’s “The State of Culture, 2024”. There is some fascinating stuff there.

“The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.”

“I see those sad-eyed junkies, hooked to their devices, wherever I go. And even their facial expressions convey that haggard strungout look.”

“And it’s a bigger issue than just struggling artists or floundering media companies. The dopamine cartel is now aggravating our worst social problems—in education, in workplaces, and in private life.”

“If you thought the drug cartels were rich, wait till you see how much money the dopamine cartel is making.”

“Also, do yourself a favor. Unplug yourself from time to time, and start noticing the trees or your goofy pets. They actually look better in real life than in the headset.”

As I read and made some notes and quiet resolutions, my thoughts raced back to the man in Charlotte lake. He showed me that I too can sit and gaze without the need to aimlessly move my finger over a glass screen.

In the age of constant connectivity and endless stimuli, mastering the art of focus is more crucial than ever. “You can’t go distraction free, overnight”, I hear me tell myself. Embracing routines and reflecting on them is the route.

Dopamine addiction is for real. To free oneself from it requires friction. Blank spaces and routines can well be the friction I am in search of. The man at Charlotte lake taught me that.