Medieval monks were distracted too
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> But in actual historical fact, a life of prayer and seclusion has never meant a life without distraction.
I don't think anyone serious claims "distraction" is a new phenomena that didn't exist before "screens." The actual claim is more like the magnitude of distraction is higher now.
To give a slightly different example: complaining that your memory is poor because you can only memorize 100 poems is very different than complaining your memory is poor because you can't memorize 10 lines, even though they're both "complaints about memory." Unfortunately, a lot of people engage with these comparisons without looking at the actual details and differences, so they say useless things (often with the effect of denying a problem).
"The early chapters of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari provides a good overview of the research, which shows that people are increasingly switching their attention from one thing to another"
The most important part, for me, was this bit:
> What they discovered is there is one mechanism that can make this happen every time. You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
For some reason they seem to think it will work when the book is electronic and small enough.
Do you mean a stationary exercise bike?
I don't read books on those because I am usually sweating and I don't want to get that on the book. Also, most paperbacks are pretty springy, so sometimes I need to have one hand holding them open, or some kind of clip system on the bike.
iPads or Kindles don't have these problems, so I can certainly imagine using them instead. I don't, probably because of an irrational aversion to getting anything from the grungy gym on my personal devices.
You may be surprised to learn people do text and bike. I’ve done it on occasion when running late to a meetup with friends.
It’s … not very safe.
My unscientific, purely vibes based take is that the ubiquity of the smartphone has created such widespread severe dopamine addiction that basic human judgment and even self preservation instinct is increasingly impaired.
[1] https://amsterdamfox.com/news/the-number-of-bicycles-per-cap... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/27/dutch-cyclists...
So it is not obvious at all which effects dominate and if this isn't just the same drivel that Gessner spouted in the 1500's about how books and the printing press were going to create an information overload and ruin our attention
- https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/a-history-of-media-tech...
Going back to the subject of contemporary education, one could also speculate that ~20 years of schooling replacing ~20 years of apprenticeship and mastery of a single craft makes the ability to resist distraction worse. Perhaps teaching someone to make wagon wheels for 20 years makes them better able to focus on a single thing than teaching them to learn all sorts of different subjects for a few hours each day?
People like to look back at previous generation's moral panics, but I can't help but think there was an element of truth to many of them.
What is the element of truth then? What was the negative impact of the printing press and how did it end society and our ability to pay attention to things?
It's so strange to have someone hear that their concern has existed for hundreds of years, the doom and gloom never materialized, and yet still double down on the same thing. What besides your intuition or the fact you share the same fear actually would lead you to think that this time it's different and tiktok is the technology that'll ruin us?
I mean, didn't it for some people? The church lost their ability to be the sole source of the bible once printing presses started churning out books. So the church lost a significant aspect of their influence on the public.
In effect when there are people screaming about societal changes it typically means they stand to lose some position of power they currently hold because of it.
It's not about a technology being able to displace power away from a specific organization or not. That's not an argument anyone was making here.
That's quite a leap from what I said. I took the stance that there is an element of truth, or at the very least a valid concern. Not that the printing press was going to end society. The tone of the linked article is definitely dismissive, something akin to "why be concerned, look at all these similar panics. We're doing just fine."
>"His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press."
This is exactly what happened. The printing press was fundamental to the Catholic/Protestant schism, enabled political pamphleteering, and is what caused newspapers to come into existence. Yes, society survived this, but the concern was no doubt real and realized. As for "the doom and gloom never materialized", what is fake news and misinformation but an unmanageable flood of information?
>"or the fact you share the same fear actually would lead you to think that this time it's different and tiktok is the technology that'll ruin us?"
You're putting words in my mouth. I do not think TikTok is going to ruin society, but I do believe it is having a negative effect on many individuals within it. You had mentioned "doubling down on the same thing", but I think that is misplaced. Superficially the concern is the same, but the cause is different. There hasn't been anything like TikTok and algorithmic recommendation in the history of civilization, so it would be wrong to dismissively assume the panic will pass and concerns about its effects are unfounded and unwarranted because that's what happened with books, radio, television, and so on.
Being a scribe is hard. It was an unusual ability to such an extent that it reinforced the medieval notion of a "vocation" (a calling or duty to do this work).
Now we require every worker who wants to rise above the level of retail sales to be capable of spending hours a day going down columns of detailed textual data in Excel or Airtables, or managing a queue of e-mails, or smoothly transitioning between inventory and maintenance.
It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction.
We're being forced by the labor market to pretend that we aren't chimpanzees.
Clearly both?
Processing dry material on a screen, that also offers endlessly seductive doom scrolling opportunities?
Sandwiched productivity & entertaining unproductively closer than its ever been!
It would be like a scribe trying to copy an endless and far too familiar religious text, while avoiding the pull of the odd pages, which all depict explicit colorful animated scenes of delicious sin.
It's like the garden of Eden, but every other tree is the kind you're not supposed to eat from. And they have nicer fruit!
I think were are characterizing this problem well. Now how do we monetize this? Let people outsource discipline, which we provide, but in a gamified, low customer effort way? I see enterprise potential.
I'm sympathetic to your response but I don't think that very many people are ignoring their work for fancy, high-impact content because high-impact content remains taboo.
Distracted people are mostly not watching TikTok, which is an obviously fireable offense.
They are mostly, as always, staring at the wood-grain on their desk for the two seconds it takes to forget which part of the TPS form they were entering.
As Spongebob said "I can't write with all these eraser shavings all over my paper! Now they're floating in my thinking space!"
Meaning I did know how to be a good enough “scribe”, but lately I feel like I’m doing a poorer and poorer job when it comes to getting it done. And most of it is related to the ability of focusing on the job at hand, or, to be more exact, to the decreasing ability of doing it.
It could be that I’m getting older (I’m in my early 40s), could be related to post-Covid effects (as pretty much all of us have have Covid at least once), could be that with “experience” (i.e. with getting older) I’ve begun to realize that it is not worth it to do certain things the way I did them before, I can’t really tell which is which, but the difference with before is there.
Comparing a new thing to an old familiar thing or a current fact can really help people overcome irrational bias against the fear of the unknown.
Metaphors, similes, and analogies are all comparisons and all recognized as powerful forms of rhetoric.
As an intuition pump, consider the following vaguely associated words and their antonyms:
up / good / positive / forwards / fast / white / on / daytime / hot / red / aroused / friendly
down / bad / negative / backwards / slow / black / off / nighttime / cold / blue / bored / indifferent
I'm sure you can add more. You can pick almost any pair of these words and find a phrase that relates them - "I'm feeling blue because Claire called off our date; she's been cold ever since Dave bad-mouthed her."
I still have "open tab" reflexes anytime I get next to my laptop and my eyes shift left regularly just as-if there were some google news side bar stream coming.
That's what every place is like, now, with always-on available-everywhere Internet. Any of us can switch from whatever we're doing, to paying attention to the carnival, in about two seconds flat, anywhere, any time—and that's when the carnival's not actively bugging us to come take a look. It's always right there, tempting us.
....and Hacker News is part of it, at the moment. Gonna close this tab and go work on something for awhile.
Consider the simple task of looking up the definition of a word that you've been pondering. In pre-internet times, you'd physically have to move your body toward a specific room and seek a specific book. There may be a carnival, but even if you look that way and get distracted, you can reorient yourself and refocus on your goal by simply assessing your physical positioning and posture in space. "Ah yes, I am standing in this hallway facing east because that's where the library is."
On your phone, you pull it out of your pocket and unlock it. Probably the unlocking is not distracting on its own, but it's also quite possible that you've got some "useful" information on your lockscreen which can distract you immediately. Bad start, but let's pretend it doesn't happen.
Ok, now you're on your phone. There's a bunch of different apps, many of them actively trying to capture your attention - carnival-goers calling out to you to look at their show. Alright, distraction achieved - now tear yourself away and get back to your task. What was that task again? You see a bunch of apps, and you're curious about what's in them. And it would only take seconds to get a little bit of value from any of them - news, uplifting stories, comedy, whatever. Can context help? You're in the same place physically and emotionally that you are for most of your life, on your couch (or maybe in front of your actual computer). Nothing is different from the times when you are actually intentionally opening those apps. Oh well, it will come to you, just pass some time at the carnival...
The choices we make can be divided into creation and consumption. The more you can push yourself to create, the more power you'll wield. If you can control what you consume, it'll make you a better creator.
Easily available distraction raises the activation energy of your would-be competitors. If you can avoid the distraction yourself, you can get ahead.
A twisted way of looking at it, but it has some truth.
Modern monks at least have almost no unstructured time, or freedom to select a new task merely because they're tired of the current one. I don't know if this is how medieval monks lived but I suspect it wasn't that different.
So I suspect boredom in its usual sense is not part of the experience, because "nothing at all" isn't an activity that they do. Almost their entire long day is specifically allocated to focused tasks. I'm sure their minds wander during prayer and attention flags during routine toil. But they have no freedom to choose something else, and so never get to do something like read a book "out of boredom."
Also, monks are praying the whole time. All the time. They are usually repeating a short prayer in their minds while they work, while they walk, while they eat. All the time. Of course, they get distracted and their minds wander (especially the newer monks), but the aspiration is to "pray continually". They aren't just letting their minds wander around and think about whatever they want. A lot of their effort and attention goes into constantly guarding their minds against distracting thoughts and re-focusing on prayer.
Monks (Orthodox Christian monks, anyway) do, indeed, have freedom to choose something else, but the whole point of their ascetic struggle is to ignore those impulses and to stay in prayer.
As it's been noticed here, surely monks were not distracted by the same technology and at the same scale we are distracted to in today's world. When I came back to the "real world" from this experience, I could realise how much one life's was just constantly distracted.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00855lt
Avicenna apparently had a very strict schedule of putting down the quill and enjoying the company of his women. So now, the fact of his genius notwithstanding, what does that do with the dopamine and distraction theorem given this man was unbelievably productive in his life?
https://historyofphilosophy.net/did-avicenna-kill-himself-ha...
It all seems to boil down to the mind, and where you stand on the mind-body (none?) issue. These days I'm tending to be far more accepting of the unified view that dispenses with the duality.
The un-settled mind is prone to distraction, naturally.
Probably not much. I forget the exact term, but when people refer to "dopamine" in the contact of distraction, they're not really talking about dopamine in general, but rather things like slot-machine-like random enforcement engagement mechanisms (which can be explicitly designed, like in social media apps, or accidentally "fall out" of new tech-enabled activities).
The differences of “distractions” are what matters here. Being distracted with god, your body, your emotions, or your mind is a human condition. Being distracted with artificial things is another.
Monks have extensive memories. Contemporary man has the memory of a goldfish. Two completely different ways the brain can work if given the right amount of stress and daily practice.
Much research has shown that those who meditate regularly have built a deliberate skill to focus their attention where needed. Many people struggle to do even that as modern attention is much more scattered between artificial distractions.
Is memory even that useful anymore? Now that we are all literate and can offload our knowledge to our devices, perhaps the ability to keep that written information organized and having systems is a more useful skill than being able to recall the information directly from your head.
Anyone can go from a fast brain to a slow mind and vice-versa.
Only your experience can tell you the usefulness.
In other words, how does knowledge become wisdom? Reflection, experience, and insight. Offloading that knowledge does nothing for us.
Sometimes it's just best to let the mind wander.
Edit: I find reading HN like picking up the newspaper. I appreciate the simple layout, but I can make a comment and be active if I choose.
You can read more about these monks here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fathers?useskin=vector
And here is a famous quote from Saint Anthony: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.”
This is relevant because a lot of the things in this book have to do with removing distractions. The monks were doing it to pray.
Okay that said:
Something I've been noticing about myself lately, which could just be reading comprehension decline?
I tend to skim what people write heavily. So much of what people write seems completely pointless. ChatGPT and other LLMs have really laid this bare. You can take a simple statement like "tell this person that I can't make it to dinner", and it will expand it into several paragraphs of niceties, but the actual information is the same.
I've noticed that it makes it difficult to switch back to information-dense reading, and to actually read all of it instead of reflexively skimming it to try and glean out the seed.
Keeping on the religious theme I've noticed this with the Psalms, even before considering the GPT stuff. I think I grew up taught to be over-dismissive of many types of poetry. I always had an impression that it was mostly just silly space-filling pseduo-deep reused imagery and repetition. School didn't help dissuade me of this.
For me, I think the thing to overcome is to focus on the value of a sense of respect for the author and the work unto itself, rather than just valuing the "understanding" you get from the text (which will always be shaped by preconceptions). A sense of awe (maybe at divine inspiration, maybe at near-divine genius, or maybe just at the sacrifice of time and life-force an ordinary person gave up to create something). For the example of the Psalms, I have noticed that despite finding the language clunky at first, they have a certain way of sticking in your head that prose does not.
A strategy I've been focusing on recently is giving myself permission to reread (and maybe memorize) important/enjoyable works. Reading something twice is basically the opposite of skimming, or a way to counteract skimming. There probably is such a thing as rereading something more than it deserves (I reread Calvin and Hobbes for the zillionth time recently, which I still deeply enjoy but now it's more of a way to relax my mind before bed than a source of insight) but there are certainly works that do deserve it [1].
Anyway, something I've been thinking about a lot as well and I agree that it's fascinating to consider how fundamental is it to the human condition that monks have been struggling with it for millennia. The book recommendation is appreciated.
I doubt that you can say a monk, who may be distrated by flies buzzing, or cows mooing, or his brothers' quills scratching at vellum, is on the same plane of distraction as someone who's jacked in to the Cybernet at all times.
There's an interdependence and reliance on these distraction factories, now, where people have given over functions to their phone: such as wallet, notebook, any and all communications with loved ones (especially in the post-C19, increasingly isolated urban wastelands.) If we can't live without our phones, and we rely on our phones for the minimum functions of life, what does that say for their ability to distract us?
Monks who are good at prayer are good at managing distractions. You don't simply "shut them out" or shun them. You roll with them like a reed swaying in the wind. I have practiced a tiny bit of Centering Prayer (see also, Hesychasm or Mindfulness). It is marvellous. I simply wish I could do it every day and live a lifestyle that's centered on Christ. Needs lots of devotion and practice. It won't reduce my distractions or ruminations, but it will help me become the master of my own thoughts.
"Firstly, it highlights the importance of daydreaming and mind-wandering as a way to promote creativity, problem-solving, and self-reflection. Readers are encouraged to carve out time in their schedules for these activities, rather than dismissing them as distractions.
Secondly, the review emphasizes the importance of boredom in stimulating creativity and the generation of new ideas. It suggests that people should embrace boredom and resist the urge to fill every moment of their day with stimulation, as this can stifle creative thinking.
Thirdly, the book review discusses the potential benefits of practices such as meditation, mindfulness, and journaling in promoting self-reflection and reducing stress. It suggests that these practices can help people to better understand their own thought processes and cultivate a greater sense of well-being.
Finally, the review highlights the role of technology in shaping our attentional habits and urges readers to be mindful of their use of technology. It suggests that people should be intentional about their use of technology and take steps to reduce distractions and increase focus, such as turning off notifications and limiting screen time.
Overall, the book review provides actionable takeaways that readers can apply to their daily lives, such as prioritizing daydreaming and mind-wandering, embracing boredom, practicing mindfulness and journaling, and being intentional about technology use."
But monks did not have multiple objects actively trying to engage their attention.
The closest historical similar situation I can think is the Victorian Gin houses.
Even books can only engage passively and only those who could read.
I'm not affiliated in any way, just heard about them in the latest YC batch.