Cult of Distraction

[Listening & Seeing - III]

There’s a difference between being distracted and the cult of distraction.

Distractions are the enemy of good work. Avoiding them is tough. It requires discipline, but even more than that, it requires a conviction that uninterrupted attention is necessary to produce good work.

A cult of distraction is deeper and more sinister. It begins with a craving—a deeply felt need—for distraction, an interruption, a break from reality. (By the way, that’s a universal craving.) It ends up becoming the enemy of being human.

A cult, by definition, is something one is initially drawn to (for whatever reason) but eventually is held hostage by. A cult is what we need for making sense of how we got here (past), how to get by in this world (present), and how to properly understand tomorrow (future). And there is absolutely no room for suspicion or doubt.

A cult of distraction can go by any name: celebrity culture, sports, politics, vacationing, and others. The only qualifier, really, is that it lures you in with its promises of grandeur and excitement (which it can easily deliver on). Once you’ve detached from reality enough, the cult of distraction warns against returning for the concrete, for truth, for real people in real time.

Reality is boring. Reality is too complex, too unpredictable. The fantasy of the cult is a better replacement. Always.

People like us that are unwilling to continue in the cult need each other. As reminders that reality is what we need. And the concrete, untelevised encounters we have with each other is what it means to be human and where it is that real change happens.