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Content for July 2023

Our topic for this month is Distraction.

1. What Is Distraction?

2. Remedy: Distraction as Lack of Focus

3. Remedy: Distraction as Boredom

4. Guest Column: Reflections from the Edge by Josh Fairchilds

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"As we stumble through what many are choosing to call late capitalism, there are countless articles and studies pointing to the unavoidable conclusion that living and working within a capitalist society leads to poor mental health."

What Is Distraction?

"Businesses across America lose upwards of $650 billion per year due to employees being distracted during work hours."

Business News Daily

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Distraction can be psychological or philosophical. Knowing what type of distraction is affecting you or your employees is the first step to finding appropriate remedies.

Psychologically, distraction is a form of inattention and lack of focus brought on by internal and external factors. Internal factors can include conditions of the body and mind which block the ability to focus. External factors involve the introduction of an event which elicits attention.

Philosophically, distraction is a kind of ennui — the French term for a boredom about one's life. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger refers to distraction (zerstruen) as a kind of dispersal of concern that shifts elsewhere. In other words, distraction is not a lack of focus, but a turn away (dispersal) from one focal point to another.

So in cases like boredom, distraction involves no longer being concerned with the project or task before oneself because one has become concerned about how boring one's life is. Not being interested in something is, ironically, a form of being interested (in something else).

If you'd like to see if you suffer from this philosophical kind of distraction, try P2U's short video quiz below, "Distracted Foregrounding".

The upshot of the distinction between the two types of distraction: the philosophical kind can be a bit more stubborn to resolve.

Let's have a closer look below.

Remedying Lack of Focus

Psychological distraction is not only costly to an organization's bottom line, but it's also tiring for employees because it means they need to take the time and energy to re-focus.

Joe Smart, Head of Organizational Development for Oxford NHS in the United Kingdom, likens psychological distraction to bad ergonomic lifting. Learning how to focus on tasks means saving time overall, and that means making more time for what you want to do.

A remedy?

Joe suggests a simple exercise whenever you fall prey to being distracted:

1. looking around your immediate environment

2. try to take in all the different stimuli (noises, people, movements, interesting objects, etc.)

3. filter out those stimuli so you can then . . .

4. focus

To hear more about his further insights into learning how not to force focus, have a listen to his Organizational Development notes, "Wednesday Waffle".

Remedying Boredom

The remedy for boredom is straightforward: Make your life engaging and meaningful.

But it's not so easy to do. Here are 2 scenarios and their remedies that can help.

1) A Few Tweaks

When work is boring, it may be because its form simply is getting old; or it's lost the connection to the kinds of things you think matter.

One remedy is to adjust the life-side of things so that it can compensate for the lack of meaning in work. This is an easier fix since the life-side of things is usually more squarely in one's control. But it's also not as satisfying because, well, your work is still incomplete.

A second remedy is to find what can be transformed at work to be more engaging and fulfilling. It sounds quite daunting, but there are many ways one can go about this. The easiest fix is to introduce perks and superficial structural changes — flexible schedules, social responsible initiatives, or even a 4-day workweek.

The obstacle is obvious: The employer has be open to these things. Hey, put them in touch with us! Such changes help with growth and retention in the right places!

2) Time to Move On

It's time to move on because the career itself is no longer of interest.

At Philosophy2u, we call this the Parallax syndrome. You enter the job with one view of what matters; but things have changed in life, and now the work no longer suits your trajectory and story.

The remedy for this problem is taking time to be reflective; to find out what it is you really want; and do the research to see how your work can align more with what you value in life. Then, you can take the practical steps to find the right vocation or role.

Reflections from the Edge:

"Is work-life balance something we're really seeking? Or is there much more?"

The narrator in Greg Stump’s irreverent 1994 film “P-Tex, Lies and Duct Tape” notes: “Happiness can be a fleeting emotion.” The film cuts from a factory line, with a menacing, marching, Germanic soundtrack to a skier floating through powder snow, with an elegant soundtrack from the musician Seal; we are to interpret that working is not happiness. Skiing is.

In my early 20’s, this film along with countless articles in the rock-climbing magazines I read through daily — with quotes, such as, “On both ends of the economic spectrum there is a leisure class” — led me to question the validity of work. At the time I was at university studying history through the lens of a Marxist leaning (or indeed outright Marxist) history department, which led me to question the very foundation of capitalism, and our inherent assumptions about its greatness.

Image from IMDB.

As an aspiring ski and climbing bum, with a half-cocked view of American economic history, the stage was set: Meaningful work is an oxymoron.

As we stumble through what many are choosing to call late capitalism, there are countless articles and studies pointing to the unavoidable conclusion that living and working within a capitalist society leads to poor mental health.

Indeed, a World Health Organization report from 2017 notes that in our capitalist world, mental-health disorders are the 3rd leading cause of death behind cardiovascular disease and cancer. Knowing what we know about some of the causes of CVD and cancer, we can likely link a number of those deaths to our jobs as well. The math isn’t pretty. Work kills.

But work also provides.

In his analysis of the longest living people, Dan Buettner has observed that several of the underlying factors in these Blue Zones are “belonging” and “purpose”. Having something meaningful and engaging to occupy our minds and bodies leads to longer and healthier lives. While a sense of belonging and purpose can be found in community and family, it can also be found at work. And of course, outside of the trust-fund class, most of us must work to fill in the bottom rungs of Maslow’s pyramid.

The author enjoying his home environs.

Well into my 3rd decade in the workforce, at a time when I am reaching what economists have termed “peak earning years”, I am also reaching what might be called peak discontent years. Did I blow it 25 years ago when, instead of pursuing the life as a recreational bum, I stepped on the conveyor belt of a career? I can hear the chorus of pro-capitalists reminding me of my home, my health care, my vacations to foreign lands, my well-stocked refrigerator.

But this reaction only further fuels my questioning: reminding me that while those things provide me with comfort, safety, and sustenance (we don’t have time here to unpack the question of why safety and sustenance must be tied to employment), they do not provide me with meaning. A healthy retirement account only gets us part way to self-actualization; and if we fall over dead from the effort of filling that account before getting to withdraw from it, then we’ve missed the mark by quite a bit.

The tired phrase “work-life balance” could very well be the culprit of so much of our collective discontent. As is if work isn’t life and life isn’t work, and the two must be balanced upon the fulcrum of our mental health. From the janitor to the equity fund manager, it might be time to re-examine how the paradigm of a career in our capitalist society has swallowed what it means to be a human being.

About the Author

Josh Fairchilds is a veteran of the outdoor industry. He lives, works and chases the fleeting emotion of happiness in the northern Rocky Mountains.

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