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The ability to look stuff up while absorbed in another task, and even get distracted in this side-road ("the Wikipedia effect") is what has caused my current ho
by jlees 17y ago
The ability to look stuff up while absorbed in another task, and even get distracted in this side-road ("the Wikipedia effect") is what has caused my current horrendous attention span. I miss the ability I had to sit and lose myself in one thing for a long period of time, frankly.
- dkarl 17y agoYou haven't changed. It's just that now you're distracted by all the new possibilities the internet provides. Going off the grid is a matter of getting rid of those possibilities. Resisting them is stressful; giving in to them is trivializing. The problem is that subconsciously, we don't see clearly. Consciously, we know that staying immersed in a book is more rewarding and is what we want to do right now, but subconsciously, every trivial impulse we don't follow up feels like a valuable opportunity lost. Truly believing, at all layers of consciousness, that those temptations have nothing to offer is the right solution, but it's hard to achieve. In Buddhism this is called the elimination of doubt or uncertainty. It means bringing your subconscious or emotional mind into accordance with your conscious convictions.