Quotes About Distraction

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert's famous description of the child's "grasshopper mind"6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically "hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.2 —David Ulin

Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of our attention? What concerns me as

But what if our capacity to perceive is actually decreasing because we are confronted with too much information, as the philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote?

Future dreams distract you from present nightmares.

I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn't going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else's life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watch each letter disappear.

Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

On Earth, social networking generally involved sitting down at a non-sentient computer and typing words about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to actually make a coffee. It was the news show they had been waiting for. It was the show where the news could be all about them.

Distraction is an attempt to escape that rarely works. You don't put out a fire by ignoring the fire. You have to acknowledge the fire. You can't compulsively swallow or tweet or drink your way out of pain. There comes a point at which you have to face it. To face yourself. In a world of a million distractions you are still left with only one mind.

Surely anyone who has ever had a smartphone or a Twitter account can relate to such compulsive behavior. Check, check, check, and once more, just to see. When the ability to check something turns into the compulsion to do so, we often find ourselves craving the time before, when there was no ability to check in the first place.

Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.

Answer emails while I should be listening to my mum talk about her trip to see a doctor. Feel the empty joy of likes and favorites.

She left the room. I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn't going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else's life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watched each letter disappear.

The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.

The trouble is our lives are cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

social networking generally involved sitting down at a nonsentient computer and typing words about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to actually make a coffee.

I used to deal with worry by distracting myself. By going out to clubs, by drinking heavily, by spending summers in Ibiza, by wanting the spiciest food, the brashest movies, the edgiest novels, the loudest music, the latest nights. I was scared of the quiet. I was scared, I suppose, of having to slow down and soften the volume. Scared of having nothing but my own mind to listen to.

Some humans not only liked violence but craved it, I realized. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted

Distraction is an attempt to escape that rarely works. You don't put out a fire by ignoring the fire. You have to acknowledge the fire [...] In a world of a million distractions you are still left with only one mind.

People with stamina aren't made any differently to anyone else… The only difference is they have a clear goal in mind, and a determination to get there. Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction. It is the ability to stick to a task when your body and mind are at their limit

Some humans not only liked violence but craved it, I realized. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

Places don't matter to people anymore. Places aren't the point. People are only ever half present where they are these days. They always have one foot in the great digital nowhere.

Nora tried to act as if every sentence he said wasn't an animal running into the road.

Stamina is essential to stay focused in a life filled with distraction