Journaling project, Day 33

[drwex]

If it entertains you now but will hurt or bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Don’t settle. Don’t exchange what you want most for what you kind of want at the moment. Study your habits. Figure out where your time goes, and remove distractions. It’s time to focus on what matters.

What distractions have been getting the best of you lately? How will you refocus your energy?

If I knew what was going to bore or hurt me "someday" my life would be so much better. But I lack that kind of crystal ball. Also, I am not in the "distractions are bad" camp. Distractions are part of a healthy coping mechanism, more times than people admit. It's good to distract oneself from unpleasant things, from rumination, from negative thought spirals. Distractions provide a kind of reset that can be worthwhile. Obviously, there are better and worse distractions but that's also kind of a personal thing. I know people who enjoy distracting themselves with fanciful projects for redecorating their living environments; people who distract themselves with cute animal pictures, etc.

That said, I'll agree that distractions can grow to take the better part of peoples' lives and I certainly spend a lot of time on distractions. That said, I'm not sure what I'd do otherwise, except substitute one distraction for another. I game and watch Netflix series; if I didn't spend hours on that I'd likely spend hours on reading books and ... I dunno. My hours of distraction don't seem to keep me from doing my job, nor volunteering for an organization I care about, nor keeping up to date with important national and social issues, nor working on maintaining my personal relationships. I dunno - tell me what you think I should value more highly and I can have an opinion on whether that's better or worse than my distractions.

I have tried to make a small conceptual shift - I've been saying "I don't have enough time for all the things I want to do." It's small, but it's a way of centering my agency in the process. There are certainly many demands that take up my time and I have little to no control over them, but I also have made a lot of choices about how my hours are spent. Maybe I should make better choices?

Comments

[elusiveat]

Ok. This is interesting.

"If it entertains you now but will hurt or bore you someday, it’s a distraction."

They give a specific, and it could be argued, non-standard definition of "distraction."

If you turn it around, they might also be implying: if it won't bore or hurt you someday, it's not a distraction.

In that case, perhaps gaming and Netflix, and reading novels, and looking at cat pictures are *only* distractions (by their definition) if they result in long term negative outcomes. My interpretation of what they are actually getting at is "distractions are the things that we do that impede our big picture goals in life." So if engaging in relatively mindless recreation is a healthy coping mechanism that enables a person to sustain themselves in a manner that in the long term actually helps them to achieve their big picture goals, then maybe the authors of this question would define those "distractions" as the exact opposite of distraction in the sense that they mean it.

Maybe...