The World Profits From Your Distraction

Author

Alex Gilliland
November 02, 2025

The more you commit to your health, the more you realize that it’s a mental game.

It often starts with the body, but it always ends in the mind. It’s your attitude and beliefs, and the acknowledgement of mental patterns that might be keeping you stuck.

Over time, you’ll navigate the patterns with more ease. While the game never ends, you get better at saying: ‘I’ve seen this before, let’s do it different this time.’

The next phase of this endless process is where you place your attention. At any given time, our attention is being siphoned into a million different things. It’s being bought, sold, rebranded, then bought and sold again. Our attention is the commodity, we’ve got to be discerning about its worth. When you let cheap dopamine buy your time, you suffer. The value of your priceless attention is diminished.

In this interview, David Foster Wallace outlines how the ability to insert content into our lives as a replacement for other things is problematic.

“The technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die."

I think we’re seeing some of the unintended consequences of this. People are struggling to communicate with each other, and rather than deal with how difficult it can be we are receding deeper into our phones, avoiding the conversation altogether. I’m guilty of it all the time, but I think we also know that it’s edifying and valuable to show up in the dirty, messy situations, to face relationship challenges, and to be vulnerable.

We must be better about what we choose to give attention.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the ‘rat race’ - the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

DFW 

I’m not hating on content. It can be inspiring and uplifting. The future, it seems, will demand and require that we get better at finding the right balance, so that it can be empowering, while we continue to evolve and grow through our own unfolding, not one that is influenced and prescribed by the algorithm. How do you think you do that? How do you know you aren’t being brainwashed? You don’t. That’s where discernment comes in, and being thoughtful about where you focus.

"What looks like a talent gap is often a focus gap. The "all-star" is often an average to above-average performer who spends more time working on what is important and less time on distractions. The talent is staying focused." 

James Clear

The talent is staying focused. And focused is not something the world wants us to be. Unless it’s focused on the next episode or the next drop, the next headline, the next piece of clickbait. When we focus on these things, we focus less on people.

It’s through people, and relationships, that we learn about ourselves. If we don’t ever have to endure difficult conversations or circumstances, will we grow? Will we learn? Will we, in the face of someone else’s pain, be able to show kindness, empathy, or grace?

The world wants us immersed in our screens, losing this tool of personal development. When we are distracted and consumed by the images, we are less connected to each other, and to ourselves. What is the long-term consequence of that? I think we’re starting to see it.

Discipline Hurts Before It Heals

The problem with cheap dopamine is that it erodes our ability to endure pain, or, at this point, mild discomfort. I’ve said this before, but we have too much to choose from. We are gluttons for consumption of ideas, images, moving pictures, etc. Silence is not something we seem to want. It is what we need. And to get it demands discipline. But I find discipline can really suck before the benefits come through.

You know what that sounds like to me? Getting healthy. Full circle.

Actually, it’s really a spiral 🌀

Good Words

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.” — Jean Paul Sartre

Lol Tweets

Love you, bye!