Dwindling Focus

With the passage of time and the burden of responsibilities increasing on each and every one of us, I am sure that many among us, if not most, will identify with my experience of the inability to concentrate and to focus on a single task for a considerable period of time. Gone are the days when I could concentrate at a stretch on a particularly interesting book or attempt to learn a new song to play on my guitar. I had chalked it up to stress of day-to-day life and setting in the rigidity of the brain as I leave the years of my young adulthood behind. However, I would be amiss not to state that I had not foreseen that such severe lack of focus would set in so quickly.

Myriad self-help books on how to improve mindfulness, hours upon endless hours of droning podcasts and institutes offering classes in meditation practices have tapped into this feeling among us and made it a lucrative way for them to earn money. The effectiveness of each of these varies and cannot be accurately determined with respect to a rationally defined metric. We cannot judge as to how any of these would help us in getting our focus back. We can try each of them and see whether we benefit from them but they cannot be said to be the cure.

Anthropologists and historians will both agree that the sea change in the human lifestyle has occurred after the widespread adoption of settled agriculture. In about 10,000 years, humanity has made a giant leap from walking to space faring. The advent of settled agriculture had eliminated the need for foraging and hunting. Settled housing provided us humans with sense of security that we now take for granted. Armed with the time to ruminate about the world around us; humans have created, invented and discovered our way to the lifestyle that we currently lead.

This same lifestyle is now becoming a hindrance to our own sense of mental well-being. An employee, or professional, or businessman, is now expected to be on call nearly 24×7, irrespective of holidays and to attend to tasks that are deemed to be important. A sense of fake urgency has crept into our systems, where results is demanded in hours, if not within days. This manufactured urgency has upended our sense of mental balance. The constant irritation of social media and instant messaging has left our nerves frayed and our minds devoid of mental focus to spare on any one task at a stretch. People are now expected to multitask, whereas it is well understood by all that such multitasking reduces productivity and results in shoddy output.

This constant low-level anxiety that pervades our mind has made it difficult for us to focus. Nearly all of us wishfully think that we would like life where this wasn’t the case but none of us can devote active effort and time to make it so as we all fear the system punishing us for displaying such boldness in going against the norm. Gone are the days of introspection and mindfulness. The days of AI assisted thinking and decision making are around the corner. Whether this would lead to a better quality of life for the common man is something that I seriously doubt.

We would do well to remember that even as recent as two decades ago we were doing fine without instant connectivity and were enjoying a much more peaceful life. I for one can fully confess that I have lost ability to just sit quietly in a place without any form of stimulation and be lost my own thoughts. I would very much like to be able to do so again. Maybe everything being instant in this digital age is not such a good thing after all.