I came across this video (linked below) by Jared Henderson (BTW, he totally looks like a Jared and no, I can’t explain why, he just does. He also has a great Jared voice. I wish I had his voice. I still kind of sound like a teenager, which would be handy if I wanted to impersonate a teenager on the phone or something) in which he talks about how we’ve lost our focus. The culprits are exactly what you’d expect–first, TV, and now the internet, smartphones, TikTok and the rest.
The chief consequence of losing focus is that we can no longer engage in activities that require concentrated, sustained thought, like…reading.
A few years ago, when my book reading began to trail off, I thought it was because I’d lost my “reading time”. When I worked at Langara, I had two SkyTrain routes for my route, with the Expo Line portion being about half an hour long–a solid hour every day, five days a week, that I ended up devoting to reading books. One year I read 40 books. It almost seems surreal now. And they weren’t all short books! When I left Langara, I lost this structured reading time, and I filled it with other things–nothing in particular, just stuff. I tried reading at night, but it never stuck. Again, I thought it was just failing to find the right “time” to read. But I think this video nails the real cause: I just can’t focus like I used to. And it’s because of the internet. And I don’t even watch TikTok.
I am making some changes going forward, and one of them is to limit my “brainlessly graze the internet to passively entertain me” time. We’ll see how it goes. I’m not making an actual resolution or anything yet, but it’s an option.
Here’s the video:
