Attention Deficit
How, in the age of instant gratification, we lost all love for the process.
by Santpal Manic
Man, I used to really love recording my own mixtapes. Sitting in my living room, kneeling in front of my all black errythin’ Technica HiFi, with a stack of CD’s, some banana Nesquik and a fresh compact cassette tape. In all honesty, it didn’t necessarily have to be ‘fresh’ — I was callously nonchalant when overdubbing my Mum’s religious prayers with ‘Dre 2001’, for instance. The thought of her hearing about how “things just ain’t the same for gangstas” mid-prayer still tickles me. But it had to be cassette. Partly due to my Vauxhall Corsa having no CD player, but also because there was a certain indulgence in spending that time recording, rewinding and replaying my playlist. For at least about a month, that cassette would be — in my eyes — the crispiest som’bitch any 12 year old would ever bear witness to. I was a self-proclaimed cognoscente of Hip Hop; a dilettante curator with the subtle ear needed to piece together a rehashed yet perfectly balanced body of music. Those mixtapes made me feel like the fucking man…and they usually only took a measly three hours to make.
Three goddamn hours. What a waste of a fucking childhood.
Fast forward a decade and some change and I can spit out ‘mixtapes’ quicker than DJ Clue. Spotify, iTunes and the plethora of cross-breeds that sit beside them let me put together and distribute playlists in minutes. And yet, rarely do I ever do so with any real vigour or contrivance. Seldom do I feel any true sense of ownership or attachment and as a result, I struggle to muster even the smallest of fucks for the compilations that litter my various iDevices. Why? They still reflect my frankly impeccable taste in music and as you’d expect, the vastness of my library dwarfs anything I had to hand as a child. So reflecting on this made me wonder — perhaps it hadn’t been the neck-snappingly dope end product that bred my adoration for my mixtapes. Perhaps it had been the process of recording them itself.
Perhaps those three hours weren’t such a waste after all.
To suggest that making such a random distinction triggered some sort of earth-shattering epiphany would be one hell of an embellishment but it did start to make me contemplate. As I looked at other areas of my life I couldn’t help but find further examples where our fixation with the attainment of a goal grossly dominates our regard — and respect — for the process that precedes it. We all want it all; we all want it now. The former, in all fairness, is pretty much natural. Humans have always been intrinsically driven by hedonism and it is our yearning to gratify our desires that propels us into action. Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’ — or what the more gully of us may refer to as ‘the thirst’— is real and, in a broad sense, healthy. But the latter — the now — is menacing; not necessarily due to our wish for timeliness, but more so due to our perception of what ‘timely’ actually means. Now is slowly becoming more immediate. In a world drenched in on demand, the act of demanding has suddenly become a lot more pervasive. We’re all a teeny bit spoilt. But who the fuck can blame us?
We are surrounded by things that battle for our attention tirelessly, in a world that moves faster than we could ever wish to. In such a milieu, our attention has become our most valuable resource. To commit it to one thing for any sustained or concentrated period of time has become increasingly harder — increasingly more of a commitment. But this reality gives rise to the paradox of attention itself…that being that it totally ceases to exist in its own absence. Commitment and attention become synonymous and ultimately, their contraposition makes them one of the same. So in our perpetually pre-occupied states, the truth is that we are never really actually occupied at all. And if you didn’t understand what I just wrote then you should have paid more fucking attention.
Playstation and some drank, technology bought my soul.” Although his introspection centres around substance abuse, I think K Dot was reflecting on the listlessness of a society strung out on the term YOLO.
We are suffering from an attention deficit. One which is only exacerbated by the tens of things we interact with on a daily basis that are geared to exploit that very fact (Microsoft even studied this shit). Dating has been diminished to mechanical swipes of the thumb and jocular throwaway badinage; as we are all quite obviously too busy and important to invest our time in the process of getting to know somebody more conventionally. To keep up with the world we’ve abandoned broadsheets to scroll through our Twitter feeds in stupor, where we are flatly promised 150 characters or less. And after all, what the fuck is the point of learning about a subject in any immersive depth when you can skim a Wiki about it as needs must? But as we dart from one 7-second Vine to another, there may be some value in questioning why so many of us find it hard to sit still. Because whilst I would never want to degrade the value of things such as Tinder, the instant gratification they provide ultimately hides their vacuousness. No biggie. But the danger here is that our addiction to cheap thrills and our fear of boredom may leave us vacuous ourselves. I feel like too many people light up a J and sing “8 doobies to the face, fuck thought” without realizing that it’s that very action that Kendrick is clowning.
This reality isn’t particularly earth-shattering but its ubiquity is scary as hell once you start to put it in perspective. The drug-like nature of the things we chase to fill our ‘empty’ time isn’t so dope once you start to consider how it affects our dopamine loops and the shift in the subconscious relationships our minds develop between reward and motivation. In isolation it doesn’t really matter; I can hear choruses of “who the fuck really cares m8” as people read this (and to them, I say “your mum”). But once we start to aggregate all the tiny nuanced ramifications, it really does. Society has foisted so many crutches on us that it may be rendering us disabled. So whilst we’re flooded with waves of information — the type our ancestors could only dream about — we spend our lives dicking around in shallow waters. Because the idea of engrossing ourselves fully in any depth, in any part of our lives, is so taxing and onerous that we no longer have the discipline or motivation to do it. Things should be easy, fast, attractive, interesting, gratifying. Y’know…just like all the shit we come across on the internet.
This new pattern of thinking and learning is not progress. It creates a phenomenon that we shall call the “short-circuit”. To reach the end of anything, to master a process, requires time, focus and energy. When people are so distracted, their minds constantly moving from one thing to another, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain concentration on one thing for a few hours, let alone for months and years.
Robert Greene, “The 50th Law”
We are losing our appreciation for the apprenticeship — the slow-burning period of time we need to develop a deep holistic proficiency for whatever it is we aspire towards. We are stymied by our inability to swallow the repetition, to constantly sharpen our focus and to ignore the millions of glorious things that promise to banish our feelings of boredom or alleviate our anxieties. There is and only ever will be one reality — all great feats in life have been preceded by an intense, toilsome drudgery. A myopic desire to put in work; to hustle with tenacity; to wholly commit to The Process. Consistency is king. The notion of a shortcut is a fallacy and know that you are surrounded by people who will try to sell it to you every day. Two week grapefruit diets and ab-crunchers that make you cover-model fleek in the snap of a celery stick. Seminars or bootcamps revealing pioneering wisdoms promising acuity and power in your career overnight. Mystical sorcery and hand-waving fuckwittery granting you eternal inner happiness and peace. It’s all a load of bollocks. And those who spout it are either charlatans or Wankstas. The only distinction being that the former is using his falsehoods to exploit you —the crook. But believe that you should hold just as much disdain for the latter — the bullshitter. Fifty once percipiently proclaimed: “I hate a liar more than I hate a thief. A thief is only after my salary; a liar’s after my reality.” He wasn’t wrong.
But committing to the process isn’t just about regaining our focus — it is about recalibrating it, too. In a world where near on everything, even sex, sits at our fingertips…can we have become too goal-oriented? The trouble with goals is that they can very easily become mirages — especially in a world where ambition has become a fashion (it might make you feel good, but you aren’t achieving anything by double-tapping that quasi-inspirational Instagram quote, homie.) By reversing our perspective to find our reward in the process itself, we divorce ourselves from a dependancy on material or notional reaffirmations of our success. We avoid making our goals daunting pipedreams that loom over us and numb ourselves to the dejection when things don’t go as well or as quickly as we may expect. Our work is our reward because we trust that it will inevitably lead to our success.
And yet, just as I am wary of my head being in the clouds, nor should it sit up my ass. Working towards a level of mastery isn’t synonymous with thoughtless graft. But as we steep into the fine details of whatever it is that we seek to accomplish, we start to attune ourselves to the granularities we never noticed before. We start to have moments of insight, which to others will look like brilliance — when in reality it is just the labor of your love. Whilst there will always be prodigies in the world, the notion of genius is pronounced far too hastily. Most ‘geniuses’ are just people who mastered a process to a level of aptitude that most could never imagine doing. But perhaps, in this day and age, that is the genius in itself.
“…you reject these n*ggas that neglect your respect for the progress of a baby step, my n*gga…” -
ScHoolboy Q (feat. Kendrick Lamar) — “Blessed”
As I finish writing this, hours before I am scheduled to leave New York for good, I sit myself in a coffee shop in the nucleus of Times Square. I figured there was no better place to test my discipline — after all, where else would better serve as an embodiment of the word distraction? Between fits of reminding myself to focus, I catch glimpses of tourists gawping at the cascade of lights that call to their ephemeral interests. Fluttering from one glittering screen to another; magpies with heavy wallets looking for light relief. This, I figure, is what they could call the distraction economy…and attention would have one hell of a price tag.
Thank you for giving me yours.
