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Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

> It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction.

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.

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It's funny, I deliberately used "less that X, more that Y" to underline that both factors contribute instead of saying "it's not that X, it is that Y."

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!"

That is a great analogy! Technology is this wonderful book, so is it reasonable to expect that we won't read half of it?

Exactly!

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 don’t think ”clearly both” makes sense when comparing two things. Perhaps you are making a straw man of the parent comment?

I think it is reasonable to assert both that distraction has been a problem for hundreds of years and that it is considerably worse now than it had been.

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