The law of distraction
I want more than bread and circus, but the hamster wheel of reels is spinning and I can't get off
Dear Soulful Revolutionary,
I wonder if you are learning the hard way, as I am, the many ways distraction is the bane of spiritual wellbeing and collective movement-building.
I deleted my social media apps from my phone over the weekend. I do this from time to time to short circuit the mental and physical habit of reaching for my phone, opening an app, and getting sucked in for a prolonged period of time.
I’m always struck by how deeply this particular neural pathway is carved as I mindlessly reach for my phone, only to realize the apps are no longer readily available. The hassle of needing to go to the apps story to download them is generally enough to deter me… for a while. This sleight of hand reveals just how habitual — even addictive — my social media use can be.
With these constraints in place, I suddenly find myself with a more spacious schedule. After a day or so of withdrawals (I use this word with its addictive connotations intentionally, which I’ll revisit later), I have more space to breathe, think and rest. I feel less anxious and better equipped to focus on the task at hand.
In his excellent Substack, The Notes of Rest Fellowship, artist-theologian Julian Davis Reid recently reflected: “We need rest not only from work that yields good fruit, but also rest from our immaturities that distract and drain.”
Distraction is a major energy siphon. When I seek to limit my distractibility, several of my immaturities become more apparent — not least of all because I have more mental bandwidth to notice them.1 These include:
My desire not to be bored;
My desire to perform a particular identity;
My desire to escape the pain of living in an unjust world.
All three of these immaturities also show up collectively. In movement spaces full of humans driven to distraction, we’re left with stunted emotional and spiritual maturity, and a curtailed capacity to imagine or organize ourselves for deep and lasting change.
If we want to resist these entropic forces, we will have to choose a different way.
Bread and circus
It may help to begin by recognizing the new reality in which we are living. In a piece called “The State of the Culture, 2024,” jazz musician and critic Ted Gioia writes that big-budget, profit-driven entertainment eating art for breakfast is not new. What is new is that entertainment is rapidly being displaced too, by distraction:
“The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.”
Distraction, Gioia goes on to explain, is predicated on addiction. When experiencing a brief distraction (like a 90 minute Instagram Reel), our brain gets a dopamine hit. The more we indulge in distraction, the more we crave. Gioia helpfully illustrates the cycle like this:
The powers that be are counting on our distractibility. While a small group of people are making a lot of money substituting distraction for culture, the rest of us are being drained of the physical and spiritual energies to cultivate alternative futures. A distracted population will squander spiritual wholeness and whittle away the energy required for real relationship-building in favor of the next hit.
Who needs violent repression when you have TikTok to quell mass organizing for social change?
This essay is a denunciation of distraction, not technology or social media, per se. Still, conscientious technology use and constrained consumption of all media is a vital part of a resistance practice. While there is lots of inspiration and community building to be found in social media spaces (I have dear friends whom I met through social media with whom I organize, teach and advocate), there is a widespread tendency to vastly overestimate the value of time spent online. And, I suspect much more of the time we spend online is distraction-based than most of us would like to admit.
We’re not the first society to face such circumstances.
Much has been made of the Roman Empire’s use of gladiator entertainment to pacify the people and prevent rebellion. First and Second Century C.E. Roman poet Juvenal wrote, “The people are only anxious for two things: bread and circuses.” Occupied by gladiator battles, chariot races, animal fights, and the like, the populace lacked the time, energy or will to resist the brutality of Roman occupation.
We too are effectively told that all we really need is bread and circus. Consumption (of food, entertainment, people) is the dangling carrot of capitalism, designed to entice us and keep us submissive to the status quo. Meta and other dopamine dealers of the world have everything to gain by our continued descent into endless distraction. We have everything to lose — particularly our spiritual sensitivity, rootedness in community, and vital connections to the more-than-human world.
“Give us this day our daily bread” is a revolutionary prayer on the lips of those who would trust the generous abundance of divine providence over the empire’s stingy, conditional whims. Stepping back from instant gratification makes it possible to seek truly nourishing spiritual fulfillment.
Ye olde flip phone: an antidote to performance and comparison
Comedian Rami Youssef has said that as a millennial who was an early adopter of the internet, the thing that had the biggest negative impact on him as a young person wasn’t something he saw (“like porn”), but rather the pressure to perform an identity. Being online young pushed him to publicly create and curate a self-image before he had fully figured out who he was.
The internet offers this strange combination of navel gazing and hyper-anxiety about the perception of the other. Social media plays upon our insecurities and relies upon comparison. We get no rest when we are performing an identity and comparing ourselves. It is a cynical and disintegrating container for human beings to inhabit.
Now, when Youssef needs to focus on writing (including when he was working on his award-winning eponymous show), he leaves his iPhone at home. Experience has made him astute: art and distraction are incompatible. With him he carries just a simple flip phone, to which only five people know the number.
Post-capitalism philosopher and activist Alnoor Ladha says, “We can declare who we are to the living world by our behaviors.” Distraction displays disinterest in the natural world (including our own bodies) and its wellbeing. It broadcasts disengagement from the work of change — whether that change entails art-making, movement-building or love.
Meanwhile, loving attention offers a gentle, non-obsessive gaze. It shows interest in life’s flourishing.
The alternative to distraction is loving attention and conscientious consumption of what nourishes us. We can choose to consume that which enlivens our senses to love and beauty, justice and truth. This doesn’t mean the avoidance of content that is painful or jarring — after all, bearing witness to the harm others are experiencing can jolt us awake to take action. It does mean actively resisting addiction to the suffering of others as a means of comparison or a form of entertainment.
Pain is trying to reach us because it has something to teach us
The social media companies have a vested interest in keeping their platforms as pain-free as possible. Their algorithms are built to prevent so-called “political” content from reaching viewers, intentionally filtering out content that might upset, provoke, or otherwise activate empathy. These platforms aren’t intended to catalyze spiritual or political awakening, or to build social capital. They are built to fill the pockets of Silicon Valley execs. Keeping us distracted keeps them rich. Our attention is one of our most powerful tools, and they know (and exploit) this.
Numbing out the suffering of the world with a constant dopamine drip means missing out on opportunities to learn from what pain can teach us. There’s a Buddhist saying: “Enlightenment doesn’t happen in a cave, it happens in the mouth of a lion.” Every time a person faces their fears by pausing to feel — really feel — their own pain or that of another person, the whole system of distraction gets a little bit destabilized. Self-knowledge (not self-performance) is sisters with moral clarity. Empathy begets solidarity.
What dreams are we missing out on dreaming, what bright ideas are going unheard, because we have numbed our bodies and dulled our senses with endless distraction?
Ferris Bueller had it right:
Soulful Revolutionary, I want you to know that you are not alone in this struggle to find direction in a whirlwind of distraction. We’re in recovery together — recovering our attention, our rest, our humanity. In paying loving attention to the divine in us, in one another, and in the world around us, we will find a new way forward.
Thank you for sharing your attention with me.
It’s important to note here that I am speaking from a place of neurotypical privilege, and even still, my brain has a very hard time finding any kind of meaningful focus amidst so much distraction. It is incredibly difficult to be healthy and connected in this system. Not impossible. But really, really hard.