Dead to Distraction

I had just flown into San­ta Bar­bara and met up with sev­er­al col­leagues for a work­ing din­ner. While oth­ers placed their orders with the wait­er, our pres­i­dent, Chris Hall, and I both pulled out our smart phones for a quick email check. I noticed a pos­i­tive response on a logis­ti­cal mat­ter we’d been con­cerned about, so I exclaimed, ​“Oh, good!” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it wasn’t until a nanosec­ond after I spoke that I reg­is­tered what Chris, lost in his own email rever­ie, had said a nanosec­ond before I spoke: ​“Oh no, my friend has passed away.”

So, to recap:

My boss: Oh no, my friend has passed away.

Me: Oh, good!

For­tu­nate­ly, Chris has a great sense of humour. Once he got over the shock of our exchange, he began laugh­ing, and we still chuck­le about it every time it comes up.

Still, the moment has become emblem­at­ic for me of the dan­gers of liv­ing in a state of con­stant dis­trac­tion. Rest assured, I’m not usu­al­ly as tone deaf as I was in that iso­lat­ed inci­dent. But I sus­pect the clam­or of ​“every­thing there is to do and think about” is drown­ing out some impor­tant music around me — leav­ing me con­sid­er­ably less able to respond in tune.

Twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry west­ern cul­ture is often pro­claimed the most dis­tract­ed in his­to­ry. Hav­ing not lived in many oth­er cen­turies, I can nei­ther con­firm or deny the asser­tion. But I can tes­ti­fy that dis­trac­tion, noise, over­whelm, hur­ry, and a ping­ing iPhone are seri­ous fac­tors in every­day life. Whether I’m try­ing to put sus­tained thought into my work, track with a mean­der­ing friend, or be still in God’s pres­ence, focused atten­tion seems cost­ly and, at times, elusive. 

I’m not alone, of course. A spate of recent busi­ness man­age­ment books (includ­ing help­ful offer­ings like Greg McKeown’s Essen­tial­ism and Cal Newport’s Deep Work) diag­nose and aim to treat our Dis­trac­tion Sick­ness. We’re urged to pare down our com­mit­ments, sched­ule sacro­sanct blocks of unin­ter­rupt­ed work time, and use social media and email only at con­trolled inter­vals. McK­e­own sug­gests that we shouldn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly pull out our smart phones even dur­ing idle times (like in a line-up at the bank), but rather inten­tion­al­ly push against the com­pul­sion to dis­tract our­selves and devel­op new habits of still­ness, patience, and thoughtfulness.

It’s easy to think of tech­nol­o­gy as the viral agent in our Dis­trac­tion Sick­ness, and in many respects, it is. But Joshua Roth­man, a writer for The New York­er, points out that there are actu­al­ly two pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for the growth of dis­trac­tion. The first, indeed, is mate­r­i­al — we live in a soci­ety ​“designed to dis­tract us” in relent­less (and ever-increas­ing) ways.

But Roth­man argues the sec­ond pos­si­ble cause is spir­i­tu­al — that ​“we’re dis­tract­ed because our souls are trou­bled.” He notes that this prob­lem pre­dates the advent of the smart phone — in the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry Pas­cal observed that ​“all men’s mis­eries derive from not being able to sit in a qui­et room alone.” Of course, Roth­man could just as eas­i­ly sourced an even ear­li­er doc­u­men­ta­tion of the prob­lem. ​“Why, my soul, are you down­cast?” asks the psalmist. ​“Why so dis­turbed with­in me?” (Ps 42:11)

It seems that the mate­r­i­al and spir­i­tu­al are expla­na­tions not in com­pe­ti­tion, but in cahoots. Our souls are rest­less (as Augus­tine self-diag­nosed in the late-fourth cen­tu­ry). Instead of find­ing real rest in our Cre­ator, we cre­ate ever-evolv­ing dis­trac­tions, which in turn make us ever more rest­less. If we are the most dis­tract­ed cul­ture in his­to­ry, it’s like­ly because we’ve had so many cen­turies to get good at distraction.

This cycle of dis­trac­tion is so entrenched that it’s easy to think it can nev­er be changed. But before we resign our­selves to lives of scat­tered dif­fu­sion, it would be good to spend some time in Romans 6. The Apos­tle Paul reminds us repeat­ed­ly that we are no longer slaves to any form of sin. But there’s a catch. Sin no longer mas­ters us because we are now slaves to right­eous­ness (Rom 6:18). Per­haps we will nev­er shake our com­pul­sion to dis­trac­tion until we are cap­tured by some­thing more compelling. 

In my work with Ren­o­varé (an orga­ni­za­tion that exists to encour­age healthy Chris­t­ian spir­i­tu­al for­ma­tion), I’ve met folks who seem to have been healed from Dis­trac­tion Sick­ness. One of them is Chris Hall, the man I men­tioned at the begin­ning of this piece. Despite (or rather because of) the many demands on his time, Chris begins every day in extend­ed silence, attend­ing to the still small voice so that he’ll be able to stay in dia­logue with God the rest of his busy day. 

Anoth­er hope­ful exam­ple is Trevor Hud­son (a South African preach­er and author who teach­es at the Ren­o­varé Insti­tute). Recent­ly I asked Trevor how he came to be so strik­ing­ly unhur­ried with peo­ple. He told me that he’d been on a con­scious jour­ney with God of learn­ing to be present—to him­self, to oth­er peo­ple, and to God. His un-dis­tract­ed­ness is a by-prod­uct of that desire to be present, rather than the oth­er way around.

I think Trevor is onto some­thing. If I can be, as Paul puts it in Romans, ​“alive to God” (6:11)— ful­ly awake and present to his pres­ence with­in me, with­in the world he’s made, and with­in oth­er peo­ple — per­haps I can, slow­ly and sure­ly, become ​“dead to dis­trac­tion.” And that’s the sort of death which I can appro­pri­ate­ly call ​“good.”