The ages of distraction
aeon.co
aeon.co
I was furious, but in retrospective it may have been the reason behind my success.
No connection forced me doing lots of things differently. For programming work, I relied only on offline documentation (man pages, MSDN...) and I set up my own servers instead of telnet-ing to the uni machines. The learning curve was a lot steeper, but after some struggle I was way more productive than my peers.
For freshman and sophomore theoretical courses, I simply cherry-picked top books with extreme care cause I knew I couldn't rely on help coming from the brand new forums for TAing our school had set up. Students hacked around exercises, but I had to fight the Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics and a few others.
It ended up as a huge success for me. I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time. This made me appreciate the value of deep and hard knowledge good books provide. Now, many years later I am struggling to return to that lifestyle while keeping some online presence...
Congratulations! I've never heard of a cross-university ranking of individual students before. Out of curiosity which country is that and how does the ranking work?
By finding the path and practicing it, the approach may give you access to enlightenment. That state then brings about a change in the brain which results in a quieter brain. I liken it to permanent and constantly available flow.
These are just my opinions based on experience. Everyone should find their own way to the truth.
Reading about Greek Stoicism (Seneca's Letters are a great starting point) and Buddhism and comparing their similarities is a great way to get the best out of both.
A book that's been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it that might also be of interest is Edward Slingerland's Trying Not to Try, which focuses on the Chinese concept of wu wei which has much in common with flow.
I'm not a fan of the term Secular Buddhism for the simple reason Gautama Buddha warned on, which is taking the concept and twisting it into something that is used to advance or elevate one person's belief over another's. We're all in this together, ergo we are Buddha Nature. No sense in complicating things.
Complications are inefficiencies. Keep your systems simple.
Edit: I've noticed personally this behaviour gets worse the more caffeine I've had.
In essence, people like Watts want to tell you, or convince you, that there's nothing you can do to improve, you would already be that person if you had it in you. Now I'm not here to argue whether or not this view is correct nor am I interested in reading your anecdotes on how that can't be right. What I am interested in knowing is whether or not these complaints about distraction and inattention are uniquely Western. What do the Africans or the Asians say about this through the course of history?
Watts was a very eclectic preacher with lots of different influences, both Western and Eastern.
For a random example of a Zen master discussing distraction, Foyan said something like "You're constantly distracted by thinking about business; how will you have time to work on enlightenment?"
And Huangbo said "If you would spend all your time—walking, sitting, standing, lying down—learning to halt the concept-forming activities your own mind, you could be sure of ultimately attaining the goal."
Kind of ties into the concepts of guilt vs shame societies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society
Both articles cites very few sources about that distinction being useful or acknowledged by sociology. I see both articles relies heavily on « Japanese Perceptions of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ».
Is there more substance and relevance to the concept ? What does it explain ?
The fact that now I don't even need to know the complexity of tax structure to file taxes let alone do calculations makes me wonder if people waste time because technology has enabled us to save so much of it.
From the other side, I have very little social interaction (no phone or Facebook) and I'm not so sure it's a better choice. Sure, I have free time, but I am also "out of the loop", which has it's own social stigma.
I tell myself that I am more useful when I focus on making meaningful contributions to something, rather than stroking my ego by seeking likes or upvotes. I probably just need to balance things better, but I cannot... just as an addict cannot do just a little of <drug>.
The consequence of the lack of attentionspan is greatly exaggerated.
Our scientists aren't getting less able to do science, our writers and musicians aren't getting less able to write or perform. Our mathematicians aren't getting less able to solve mathematical problems.
In aggregate humans through the use of technology is charging on becoming ever more sophisticated. A society without technology would not be able to have accumulated the knowledge we have today. People without ability are being helped by technology.
With the worlds collective information doubling in something that resembles Moores Law for most people it would simply be unwise to focus too much.
What I think we need to realize is that we don't need everyone to be expert specialists. We need a mix of experts specialists and specialist generalists.