Choosing To Focus On the Other Person and Not Some Worthless Diversion

I can choose loving attention or unfocused madness

Firstsignal. Active neuron cells, synapse network.

I was listening to someone very close to me the other day and partway through the conversation I began reading a worthless email.

It happens more and more that when I’m in the middle of a conversation and a particular moment doesn’t require every neuron that I possess, I shift focus to some thought, or slack message or text or email. What inevitably happens is that I need to say, “sorry, I got caught up in something”, when I miss what was just said to me.

Like some wretched addict, I know what I’m doing is wrong and yet I do it anyway.

And it’s not just me. I see it everywhere: people slumped over smartphones while fully stopped at a green light or texting while checking out at the market while the cashier stands there in righteous anger with veins throbbing in her neck.  

Video calls for business are also rife with it: all while you’re holding a “conversation”, you might see eyes darting left to right (reading), hear clacking noises (typing), and see the other person glancing downwards followed by a small smile completely out of context of the conversation (texting).

What then?

We can’t blame technology for our actions because it can’t make any of us act one way or another. We can’t blame ignorance because we know what we are doing and we do it anyway. We can’t blame the other person because they’re not demanding that we blow them off.  

Why is it that I drop down on my knees before a typed message on a glowing screen? I have become a slave to plastic and glass and words that don’t even require living breath.

This line of thinking helps me reframe the matter. I am consciously subverting my mind – the thing that differentiates me from a rock or a tree – and placing it beneath a couple of pixels and impulsive emotions. Do I think so little of life? Or of myself? What are we if not our actions?

Who then is left to blame?

From this starting point of admitting our sin we can begin to turn this mess about and learn what it is.

When I cut my attention away from the other person who is sharing this moment of life with me, what am I telling her? I’m telling her that my time is more valuable than hers; I’m telling her that whatever else I’m focusing on is more important than her as a human being; I’m telling her that I don’t give a damn about her.

And how does anyone with even the slightest self-respect put up with this for long? Those who would are either saints or hate themselves. Those that wouldn’t, I would lose: they wouldn’t lean on me and I couldn’t lean on them. They would begin to fortify themselves against me so that I can’t hurt them.

Now I can completely disengage and flat out ignore whoever I'm speaking with, or on the other hand, I can spend every single moment dedicated with the most intense focus. The part that eats away at me the most is that in these moments where I lose attention I catch myself doing neither – I drift my way through this non-committal, middle-ground wasteland in which neither her nor I get full benefit.

My mind is not fully committed, and this incredible moment is being sacrificed for what? For halves: half-thinking, half-caring, half-living.

I would rather spend some time each day serenading myself in extremes, alternating between 210 degrees and 35 degrees, greater than 170 bpm and less than 50 bpm, over every single day spent lukewarm and predictable and atrophied.

Does it then make sense for me to seek the middle-ground when it comes to my relationships which are more important than this corpse I walk around in?  

But the productivity hacker doesn’t like this line of thinking: “What? I’m multitasking. I prophesize that this is the way of the future and those who can’t keep up will be left behind. I’m more productive than the chumps who can’t handle this much stimulation.”

Productive in what way? In eroding your ability to focus on a single matter? In disrespecting each and every brother and sister and son and daughter you interact with each and every day? In being a living breathing contradiction, claiming to “hack” your way to productivity by sacrificing the only actual end of productivity: to try to be marginally more useful to others today than you were yesterday?  

And when you’re 70 years old and have hacked your way to loneliness – are you then getting more done? “But I’ve made millions. Why does no one love me?” Is that surprising? What reason have you given them to think that you’re willing to risk your life for them?

I lay no claim to superiority, but at the very least I think I’m a better prophet than you are.

What follows? How do we apply this to the real world when the game is on?

If I know that this is the last moment on earth I will ever have, and this person before me is the last person I will ever speak with, how would I act differently?  

And will I choose to look at my phone, or into the eyes of a child or a dog who will also grow old and die? Which is more important?

This is the test: I will give myself over entirely to those important to me. If it is decided that my time and theirs is to be spent in unison, I will be right here, right now, and nowhere else.

My screen lights up, or my phone vibrates in my pocket, or a new email I’ve been expecting just arrived: I will put it away – it will still be there when I'm done, if it even matters by then.

These things are nothing in comparison to the divine ape sitting before me.