Pathologies of the attention economy
theconvivialsociety.substack.com
theconvivialsociety.substack.com
So I grant this is definitely happening, but it begs the question of why in this environment 100% of people don’t suffer from ADHD? One reasonable answer, which I cannot prove beyond saying it matches my anecdotal experience, is that the ADHD problem is part nurture (information overload from a changing media environment that affects everyone) but also part nature (every brain is naturally a little bit different).
I have always had inattention—just ask my parents and childhood teachers. It had nothing to do with the Internet. No question the internet has posed extra challenges to my naturally weaker attention, in a similar way to how the invention of skyscrapers posed a challenge to people in wheelchairs. This analogy fails with the invention of elevators, for which the ADHD sufferer has no equivalent accommodation in our modern media world.
I wish I could invite non-ADHD-havers into my brain for a day to show them what it’s really like. Even now, as an adult with robust coping strategies, inattention afflicts me in all corners of my life. I struggle with the unexpected if it hits me when I’m focused on something, which leads to problems making friends or navigating stimulating social environments. I have trouble listening to friends or dates in busy bars or cafes, which is a related but distinct problem. When I’m trying to get into a flow at work I frequently get random, highly salient impulses to do other things that are important but aren’t the thing I need to do at that moment. Crucially I resist these urges, but they make achieving the flow I crave—and the success of my work—more difficult.
Even in current year, I think a lot of people (and certainly a lot of doctors!) don’t believe that any of this is real, and all I want from life is to take speed and scroll Reddit and Twitter all night. Let me assure you that this is not the case. If anything, the people I know IRL who have ADHD are among the most driven people out there. They almost have to be, because the minute they drop their guard their dreams start slipping away.
doesn't mean what you think it means
The pedantry that approves only the intransitive usage and rejects the transitive usage is silly on several levels.
I'm not opposed to linguistic innovation if it makes the language more elegant or more expressive, but misuse of "beg the question" is just ugly and cringe-inducing.
Language isn't logical. It's a bricolage of things people have done to communicate. It's a mash-up of many different tools all trying to accomplish a hundred different things, and if people can't find a handy screwdriver, they may successfully use a butterknife instead.
It's not incorrect, and calling it that is exactly the misguided pedantry referred to in GP.
> I'm not opposed to linguistic innovation if it makes the language more elegant or more expressive
The intransitive sense of “begs the question” does exactly that, and I explained how it does that in GP. Also, its been in common use long enough that it is hardly "innovation”; the persistent pedantic struggle against it is a reactionary struggle for linguistic regression. Which might still make some sense, if the usage was one which created confusion or obscured meaning, but its not.
Having said this, on the internet, I must now defend it.
to beg in conversation is of course more energetic than raising or prompting. When you beg it is urgent, a question that has been raised can be tabled for later, a prompt can be ignored as we point at a different reporter we know is more likely to ask about how this affects the First Lady, but if the question is being begged it demands an answer from us.
To beg calls forth the image naturally, for those who think in images, of a beggar. A beggar has moral urgency, they need what we have to give, and that moral urgency of the image is transferred to the question implied by the subject of discussion.
To prompt or raise a question have absolutely no visual analogue, they are lifeless, bloodless, and should be buried before rotting.
Why do you think that this more common usage of beg the question has come into play? It's not (necessarily) ignorance, I believe the cause is that the phrasing in English far better supports what is wanted and this allowed the phrase itself to spread among the population as a tool for expressing thought.
Begging the question, as the Wikipedia article you link explains, is a logical fallacy akin to circular reasoning: x is some way because it is x. My usage of the term was calling out this weakness in the article. I am not completely sure what the intent of your comment is and suspect you might be leaning on your awareness of this lesser-known fact as a sort of thought-terminating cliche.
ADHD is also at least in some people, a developmental problem sort of like a muscle imbalance where people learn to do an action with a set of muscles and neglect whole muscle groups and end up kind of able to do everything but with drawbacks because they weren't trained properly.
After a concussion and extensive testing, I discovered the latter about myself. There are a lot of things I'm quite good at with neurological tests and one working memory test that I'm just terrible at. So much started making sense when I discovered this about my whole life. And maybe my brain is just weird but what I actually think is it's something that just never got trained because I got good at other things early which compensated.
Now the struggle is finding professionals interested in helping instead of telling me everything will be better with an SSRI and talk about my feelings.
I'm sure that I'm still a certain kind of person, but a lot of my "symptoms" could actually be trained away if properly measured and exercised.
There is still a stereotype of ADHD as the hyperactive child: running around, yelling, disrupting others. When your ADHD presents as absentmindedness, lack of attention and staying on task, daydreaming and so on it is much easier for it to go unnoticed.
I have plenty of ADHD symptoms that will be noticed by those around me. Forgetfulness, distractibility, poor working memory but it's really just the tip of the iceberg.
Monks.
Reading about how medieval monks conceived of attention and distraction in both functional and spiritual contexts is useful to ground the conversation in how technology (here, often literacy) impacts our ability to do what we mean to do. It is a lot easier (given more generally available/palatable sources) to begin the conversation at the dawn of the modern, but we really shouldn't!
(I'll bet you there's good stuff outside European/Western history, too, I just happen to know the Christian monastic stuff)
Thomas Aquinas talked about attention/boredom, I think, but I can't read him unless I'm in a very particular mindset so I don't have much to cite you.
Hm. I looked a bit at some different stuff but the problem is that I can't really recommend e.g. [The Imitation of Christ](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_the_Imitation_of_Christ) unless you're really looking to spend a while with medieval Christianity for its own sake, with the treatment of attention sort of incidental. I will think more and come back to this comment thread if I come up with a better rec. (I'll also note that a tragic portion of this stuff is dead-tree-only)
A priest friend recommended Thomas a Kempis to me, and I enjoyed listening to this audiobook version. Yes, it's not for the agnostics or the faint of heart, but it is an amazing explication of what it means to be a faithful layman and follower of Jesus.
You know how when you're sick but you have no diagnosis, it's difficult to treat or heal from it? Yeah, that's how it is spiritually. If you don't know the root causes or motivations for your sinful ways, you can't escape them and you're still in slavery.
So once I identified acedia (and it's a slippery, amorphous, insidious malady) I was able to make great progress along the path. In fact, God granted me the graces of self-knowledge and introspection so that I could further discern my identit, my vocation, and my destiny.
Yep so if you're doomscrolling your smartphone all day, or if you're addicted to Netflix/YouTube, you're probably suffering from acedia just as much as the French loved their absinthe and opium. Get diagnosed and get some help from above!
However, at every worship service, we communally recite a confession of sins, and the phrase "and left undone" usually jiggles a couple things loose that, indeed, I have failed to do, to the usually slight but compounding detriment of my family or my colleagues - in other words, small (but compounding) sins of omission.
Unfortunately, I'd feel rather impolite pulling out a notepad or my phone to jot that down, and I've usually forgotten what it was by the time church lets out... (edited to add) but I could discreetly jot it down on the service leaflet.
And now I've looked up "acedia," and would love to know the title or author of that book your priest had you read.
I think hermits in christianity did much the same.
Daoism also has good remarks, but I am not qualified to speak on that.
But then they butcher meditation into a product, package it in an app and rent it to you by the month. Lol.
Google "meditation monetization". Smell the unironic gushing and marketspeak.
I for one am of the mind that the play button on my pomodoro is the play button on the VCR of my mind. And what price do I pay for having my mind locked behind such a taxing labor to liberate? Well-fed, sheltered, scanned and medicated?
Maybe we catastrophize that the dogear became the bookmark, the radio dial (being dialed-in) transmorphed into a play button, or the play button into the combined lock-button fingerprint-sensor.
The major point of the piece is that the hyper commodification of attention has created a techno-social order that does not accommodate the type of beings that we are. And when we fail to fulfill the demands of capitalism, that is pathologized as an individual disorder.
He also clarifies that the frameworks presented aren't all encompassing
> I’ve learned in listening to others tell their stories over the years that however thick or compelling the theoretical framework may be, it will not account for all of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of human experience.
His arguments are not about the individual, but about the systems that create and exacerbate psychological differences, pathologize those differences, and then commodify their "cures".
It doesn't matter if you love or hate capitalism. You're subjected to it regardless.
Gov should do an annual sample computer-scored interactive test on 1000 5-year-olds to see adhd truly is increasing irrespective of increasing diagnostic criteria.