Everywhere but Here

Why you can't pay attention

If there is one defining struggle of modern life, it is our inability to be present. Immersed in a digital ecosystem vying for our attention, our minds are scattered across a thousand inputs, never able to remain with just one for more than a heartbeat. In this state of perpetual distraction, though our bodies may remain grounded to our immediate surroundings, our minds are everywhere else. They are everywhere except where it's most important for them to be. Everywhere but here.

But before we lay the blame for our distracted minds entirely at the feet of our digital creations, a closer look reveals a different story.

There exists within all of us an internal appetite for something new, a distraction from the here and now. As Oliver Burkeman writes, "we're told that there is a 'war for our attention' with Silicon Valley as the invading force. But if that's true, our role on the battlefield is often that of collaborators with the enemy."

Indeed, humans have endured this excruciating battle to keep our minds planted in the present since long before we became hooked on screens. This eternal struggle has been a central theme across philosophy, religion and literature for several millennia.

The Buddha taught his followers "do not pursue the past, do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is, the future is yet to come. Look deeply at life as it is in the here and now." Practices like yoga, meditation and repeated mantras, popular in Indian culture for thousands of years, aim to align the mind, body and spirit, fostering awareness and presence in the moment.

Likewise, the Roman Emperor (and cultural man-of-the-moment) Marcus Aurelius wrote to remind himself that "each of us lives only in the present moment, a mere fragment in time: the rest is life past or uncertain future." Around 140 years earlier, Jesus delivered his famous Sermon on the Mount, where he urged his followers to "take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the thing itself."

That those living thousands of years ago struggled with the same restlessness that we do today speaks to its deep evolutionary roots: the human brain didn't evolve to linger in the present but to scan for threats, learn from past experiences and anticipate the future. The same instincts that once helped our ancestors survive now leave us uneasy in moments of stillness, searching for stimulation even when there is none to be found. Technology didn't invent distraction, it simply amplifies our inherent struggle, feeding a tendency that was always there.

However, what our devices have invented is a new type of distraction. While the followers of Jesus or the Buddha had to contend with temporal distractions - their minds occupied by regrets of the past or fears and desires for the future - today we must also battle with spatial distractions - a virtual displacement that propels our minds into a realm of infinite possibilities. Our devices can transport us to places previously inaccessible, allowing our attention to be anywhere and everywhere all at once. It's no longer just that we're impaired by our innate inability to focus, but that we're immersed in an ecosystem that's meticulously designed to prevent us from ever doing so.

This precarious relationship with the present represents a great paradox of the human condition: something as (seemingly) simple as keeping our minds focused on the here and now can evoke such intense discomfort. The slightest moment of boredom is enough to initiate an insatiable desire for something new. And in our digital age, this desire for something new is greeted with an eternal supply of information, 'content' to engage us forever more.

As many have noted before, the introduction of the iPhone hit the final nail in boredom's coffin. While in the pre-digital world people were forced to sit with boredom and endure the more mundane parts of human existence, citizens of the digital world can bypass these moments by burying our minds into the endless wonders of the screen.

But in doing so, we forgo a crucial lesson in life: that literally anything worth doing, from achieving personal goals to maintaining relationships to simply cultivating inner peace, requires patience, resilience and a willingness to overcome the inevitable obstacles and setbacks that come our way. Each time we seek comfort in a distraction, we deny ourselves the opportunity to grow and experience life at its fullest.

Albert Einstein once said "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." Putting to one side that Einstein was in fact exceptionally smart, the point is that no amount of intelligence can achieve anything if the mind that possesses it is incapable of deep thought and contemplation for extended periods of time.

This struggle is deeply embedded in all forms of human art and creativity. Whether it's the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa or the Great Pyramid of Giza, the most enduring wonders of our world required many years of unwavering focus and mastery to complete (and in some cases, 30,000 'skilled labourers'). Pioneering works from the likes of Newton, Copernicus, Marie Curie and many others took decades of rigorous study and immense patience to achieve.

It's inconceivable that any of these great works could have ever been completed had their creators been absorbed in a political soap opera unfolding on the other side of the planet. Had it occurred today, the apple that fell upon Newton's head would have been no more than a brief inconvenience before he quickly returned to scrolling through the mind-shattering world of TikTok.

Yet perhaps the cruelest aspect of our human nature is that even our most cherished moments are not safe from this restless desire for something new. As Machiavelli observed many centuries ago, "Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly."

This is evident in how we anticipate for months our dream holidays, milestone celebrations or bucket-list events, only to find that when the moment arrives, we remain just as distracted as ever. Even the highlights of our lives, the moments we label unforgettable, become subject to our inability to remain present, leaving us searching for the next fleeting high.

This endless search for something else feeds a vicious cycle: we convince ourselves that if only we reach there - our next desire or the next input from our devices - then we will be satisfied. Yet the cruel irony is that arrival offers no relief, as there inevitably becomes here, burdened with the same restlessness we sought to escape.

The entrepreneur and angel investor Naval Ravikant says "If you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht." In the same way, if you can't be happy here, you won't be happy there. We project greater contenment with life once we arrive there, but fail to realise that our fears and anxieties of the present will come along for the ride. Only by addressing our problems as they are right now can we ever hope to achieve this fleeting happiness.

In many ways, this flaw in our mindset stems from our unwillingness to embrace the constraints imposed upon us by reality. Part of the reason we often prefer to live in our imaginary future is that it allows us to maintain multiple threads of life without ever needing to actually pick one. We can simultaneously envisage a future in which we settle down to build a stable life and raise a family while also imagining ourselves dropping everything to travel the world free from obligations. We can see ourselves climbing the career ladder to financial security while also romanticising the idea of quitting the rat race and escaping to a simpler life.

As the French philosopher Henri Bergson writes, "the future, which we dispose of to our liking, presents itself to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible." No matter how contradictory, our imagined future offers an escape from the constraints of the present. It allows us to exist in a state of possibility rather than reality.

The same is true of our digital distractions. Just as we find hypothesising over an infinity of possible futures more appealing than embracing the present, so too do we find the digital world more alluring than our immediate surroundings. It promises that we can be everywhere , experience everything, all without ever having to choose. In this state of living, our increasingly fragile minds find comfort in the absence of sacrifice required.

To the extent that we can ever be free of this mental inclination, this desire to have something else or to be somewhere else, the most important step is to first become aware of it. To be the observer of our own mind, watching as it claws its way out of the here and now in pursuit of momentary comfort elsewhere.

In a world of such vast possibilities, it's essential to make a deliberate effort to slow down and refrain from filling every waking second of our lives with an input, a distraction. Failing to do so will only lead to further decaying of our attention spans as we switch from one input to another at an ever-increasing rate.

In If, the famous Victorian-era poem, Kipling urges his son to seize the present moment, to "fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run." Today, the unforgiving minute is nowhere to be found. It's been shattered into a thousand tiny pieces that we frantically attempt to engage with all at once.

If we are ever to rediscover it and escape this fragmented existence, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of the 'flow state' offers a compelling antidote. Referring to a mental state of complete immersion and focus in an activity, flow represents the height of presence, where time seems to vanish and our sense of self temporarily dissolves. It is the epitome of being fully engaged in the here and now.

But actually obtaining such a mental state requires time and space to figure out which activities or circumstances can ignite it. And if we are ever to do so, we must be willing to embrace the finitude of our own existence and make a conscious choice in how we spend our time. By recognising that we do not have forever, and therefore, no matter how enticing, cannot engage with everything the digital world has to offer, we're forced to be more protective of our limited time.

If you knew you were to die tomorrow, would you continue to scatter your mind across the myriad of junk that your social media feeds present to you as if in any way relevant to your life? Would you continue to immerse your mind in a news environment that shows you nothing but the very worst of mankind? Or instead, would you focus on what truly matters to you and disregard all the irrelevancies that seek to detach your mind from the present.

But more than all of this, cultivating presence in the here and now is so essential because it quite literally is all that our life will ever be. As Oliver Burkeman writes, “your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention to. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.”

And for so many today, more than ever before, these moments that mark the contours of our lives are experienced with an absent mind. A mind always in a state of anticipation, looking elsewhere for what is yet to come. Meanwhile, that which we live in expectancy of becomes the present that we disregard and passes us by unnoticed.

Naturally, Arthur Schopenhauer captured this sentiment better than I ever could in his essay on ‘the vanity of existence’:

The present is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.

In the end, it seems humbling to note that, despite the many hours dedicated to writing this, the various references, quotes from philosophers with funny names, discarded drafts and many hundreds of lines written, all to say what Ferris Bueller famously captured in just two:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”