It's Complicated

III: It’s Complicated
I realize I’ve been incredibly productive so far. It’s the excitement of embarking on something new—the novelty of it all. The setting, the topic, the whole effort. But it occurs to me that it’s also that, in putting myself here, I’ve unwittingly removed a lot of my usual distractions. There’s no wireless Internet in this building, so surfing the web, checking emails, and wasting time on Facebook aren’t even options. And since I’ve made a rule that I have to remain in my chair for the entire three-hour duration, I make sure I’m hydrated, fed, and prepared to last, before I even sit down. I'm beginning to wonder what's so distracting about The Distraction Project.

A few months ago I went on a diet. I did a great job with it. I cooked vegetables, ate salads, and cut out sweets entirely except for once a week. I ate well—food I really liked—and I lost weight. But after eight weeks, I got tired of it. I was bored of dieting. I was annoyed by dieting. I was disenchanted with dieting. All it did was remove fat from my body. It didn’t solve my relationship problems. It didn’t get my book written. It didn’t make me happier or fitter (the diet didn’t involve exercise) or more popular. I did, at least to my mind, look better. But nobody cared. Maybe my boyfriend liked it a little bit, but he didn’t say a word about that because it’s not something he thinks is particularly important. He waited until I said, “Can’t you tell I’m skinnier?” before replying in the affirmative, validating what good work I had done. My roommate, who had been against the idea from the beginning, was just relieved when I announced that I was through with it.

I do have a point. It’s that there are many, many things that prevent us from doing things we supposedly want to do. Blaming distraction is the flavor of the moment—the thing we’re just beginning to notice because it’s changing the way we live. But it’s just one aspect of the way we live, and it’s only one of many things that affect it. Getting work done requires an understanding of much more than simply why it’s a good idea to turn off your phone.

Sometimes, it turns out, distraction can be the best thing that ever happened to a person. It’s an important tool we use to save us from ourselves. “Habits aren’t broken,” I once heard Dr. Phil say (I know, I know). “They’re replaced by other habits.” I found a touching example of this on a website called TheSite.org (“Your Guide to the Real World”) under the “Mental Health” heading. It was a list of “Coping Tips and Distractions” for cutters—people who suffer from the urge to inflict “self-harm.” In this contest between the lesser of two evils, distraction stands like a paragon of health. The idea is that although distracting yourself to get through an intense moment won’t cure your deeper problem, it will at least prevent you from doing physical damage to yourself while you are (hopefully) working on solving the bigger issue.

The advice is along the lines of, “Rub ice on your skin in the place you would usually cut”—ice feels intense enough, evidently, to do the trick. And honestly, to me this sounds like genius. The long list of possible ways to distract yourself from cutting actually looks like a lot of fun: “Bake or cook something tasty.” “Dance your socks off.” “Pop bubble wrap.” It’s obvious that there could be far worse things happening to us than being distracted.

Just now I couldn’t resist picking at that paper in front of my desk. Turns out that’s real glass, and sharp. I almost cut myself. I guess it would serve me right. And it points out an important truth about self-harm: People do it to distract themselves from other, deeper, overwhelming negative emotions or traumas that they can’t cope with. The intensity of the physical sensation of being cut, and then the immediate need to deal with the damage, pulls the mind out of its bad place, at least temporarily, into the present. So cutters are, in a way, addicted to the distraction that cutting provides.

But what if the things we’re most distracted by are things we love? Or are ways to be closer to the people we love? For example, watching sports is the ultimate distraction. I’m looking forward to watching basketball with my boyfriend tonight. Lakers versus Celtics. It’s kind of a big deal because my grandmother is the biggest Lakers fan of all time. She’s 90 years old and, when my sister visited her last month, she was wearing her “Lakers colors.” I have a memory of watching those two teams play with her when I was about ten, sitting in her bedroom cheering on Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Marveling at Larry Byrd’s mustache. This was a distraction, sure. But it was special. It transcended what we mean when we say we’re distracted. It makes me wonder how to even define the word “distraction.” I read that it’s the opposite of attention. But my grandma and I were paying attention to those basketball games—close attention. They had our full attention. They had our sustained attention.

Are “distraction” and “attention” purely relative terms, then? Something’s a distraction when you should be, or think you should be, paying attention to something else. But it’s not a distraction if it’s somehow sanctioned as a valid thing to focus on, by you or by society. In this sense, distraction can be (and is) anything and everything.

In the sense that Appleyard rails against, however, the meaning of distraction is much more specific. In that case, distraction is a way of functioning defined by continual skipping from one thing to the next without ever really settling in and truly absorbing any single thing. In the sense that it has changed our world in ways we have not even begun to grasp, “distraction” does not describe what life consists of but how it’s lived.