Inattentional blindness

Move over Louis Vuitton, boredom is the luxury we really need.

Dear Global Jigsaw,

There is a meme doing the rounds on social media which made me crack a smile, because it resonated so deeply. “Be honest,” it read, “you are more likely to remember all the lyrics of a 1980s pop song than to remember why you just walked into the kitchen.” But behind my giggle, there was a nagging worry.

Sometimes I feel I am losing my mind. Words - my long-standing playmates - have begun, on occasion, to skulk at the edges of recall. In the shower, I have urgent-feeling thoughts which I can’t remember by the time I finish towel-drying myself. At bedtime, my mind is full of to-do lists that dissipate when I reach for pen and paper to write them down.

I’ve worried that I might have early-stage Alzheimer’s, or that I might be suffering lingering brain fog from the chemotherapy I received two years ago. But then I’m on stage at a literary panel and suddenly razor-sharp. Or I’m writing a chapter of a new book, and the sentences begin to zing onto the page - burning bright like lexical shooting stars. In these moments, something profound surfaces, something akin to joy. When thought and body are one. The mouth and mind align. Everything extraneous goes silent. When, in other words, I encounter that increasingly elusive companion: focus.

Luxury is a fungible concept. As a teenager in 1980s Delhi, it equated to Levi’s jeans and Toblerone chocolates. When I became a mother a couple of decades later, I began to think of it as clean air and good healthcare. But today, as Homo sapiens stand on the brink of evolving into cyborgs—their brains outsourced to machines—the real luxury is focus. The ability to refuse our collective, normalised state of distraction. To hold a single point of attention long enough to have an epiphany. To sit with difficulty and discomfort until it pays off with a reward that can only come at the end of that process. To be bored enough to turn inward and tend to that interiority. To savour time, instead of always trying to save it.

I think of microwaving water for tea. Of being incapable of reading Tolstoy. Of life unfolding to the tick-tock of phone notifications. Of rabbit holes. Addiction. Restlessness – of the mind stripped of rest.

I am reading the artist Jenny Odell’s 2019 manifesto against distraction, How to Do Nothing, which is about doing less, but doing it well—as an antidote to the constant, empty doing that has so many of us jumping from Duolingo to Google to Instagram and WhatsApp, in a conveyor belt of notifications that carry off our days and years. The book is one of a slew of contemporary works that raises the alarm about the cognitive fallout of the distraction economy: fractured attention.

The truth of these claims is most evident in the classroom. I teach in the communications field at two universities in Madrid, and my adventures in the land of Gen Z have been inglorious. The students I teach are from globally elite backgrounds, and they not only lack the focus required to read a full book, but are also unable to remember assignments or deadlines without constant prompting. Their writing is as horrible as their memories- badly constructed, lacking basic punctuation, and occasionally incoherent. It reads like a transcript of speech: jumping from point to point, entering mid-way into arguments, reactive to its own structure. I have found myself taking solace in the fact that, given the poor quality, it must be their own work and not ChatGPT’s plagiarized offerings.

Their opinions often stem from feelings rather than reason. In class, they say things like, “I don’t know why, but I think…” This is not just them. It is us. We think, but we don’t know why. We have become mysterious to ourselves, our minds inhabiting a digital space that is untethered from the physical place occupied by our bodies. Cultural critic, William Deresiewicz, suggests that by spending too much time on social media, or stuck to the news cycle, we marinate ourselves in conventional wisdom—in other people’s reality, for others, not ourselves.

And this is true, of course. Our reality is rendered by patterns of attention - what we choose to notice and what we ignore. To pay attention to one thing is to resist focusing on something else. I first became acutely aware of this during a seminar I attended at a U.S. Ivy League university about a decade ago. The professor played a video that featured a group of people passing a basketball to each other. The class was asked to count the number of times those dressed in white vests passed the ball to each other. Ever the dutiful student, I kept count for the video’s duration and was sure I had the correct answer—until the professor inquired how many of us had seen the gorilla.

I was thoroughly bewildered until he played the video back—and sure enough, halfway through, someone in a black gorilla suit walks across the screen. There was no ignoring it once I was looking for it, but when my attention had been on counting ball passes, the gorilla was rendered invisible. The experiment I had just been part of was devised as an inattentional blindness test in the 1990s.

I’d been staggered at the time by how I could look at a GORILLA and not see it. But now, a decade on, Odell’s book has me wondering how much of life I do not see, given how much my attention in corralled by devices. By losing focus on presence, the world becomes an impoverished, mostly undifferentiated thing—bleached of its diverse wondrousness by the combined forces of habit, familiarity, and distraction.

Odell urges the reader to disengage from the attention economy and reengage in time and space- to meet others and that around them at the level of attention. None of this is breaking news. But I seem to have reached some kind of personal tipping point.

It is ridiculous how much of human life has been bundled into our phones- connection, payments, health, memories, every kind of measurement. I have decided to unbundle some of these out of my mobile. I am now wearing an old-fashioned analogue watch, so I don’t need to check my phone for the time. I no longer carry my phone when I step out for a walk, a refusal that liberates me from my pedometer app and its tyrannical step count reminders. I want to get a nice digital camera- so I don’t need my phone for photographs. And perhaps an old Nokia-style flip phone, so that my family can reach me if they really need to. I want to spend hours every day reading from the pages of a book, which is so much more restful for the eyes and mind than reading from a screen. I suppose, I want to go back to the early 2000s, when technology felt more servant than master.

I am able to do some of this only because of the privileges- economic and cultural – that I enjoy. I won’t lose my job by refusing to be constantly available. I can take meandering walks because I live in a country with clean air and safe public spaces. I can reflect upon the addictive ecosystem of the distraction economy because I have access to the intellectual resources that facilitate such contemplation.

Alas, focus has become a luxury good. Boredom, an elite past time. Strange times, indeed.

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Until next week,

Pallavi