Why did you open this article?
Were you going down your feed and saw something that was different?
Or perhaps you just need a break from the craziness of life?
This article is a distraction, to take your attention, to lead you down the rabbit hole.
Last night I had an intense emotional discussion with my wife. Notice how I cleverly avoided the word fight.
Today I found myself pacing, moving to pick something up then stopping before I did and going to do something else, then deciding the first thing was more important and going back to that.
I was, as my father would say, running around like a headless chicken. (In case you didn’t know, chickens will still run around for a while after you cut their head off. One chicken named Mike the Headless lived for 18 months without a head, you can check him out on Google.) Notice how I distracted you again, who cares about that fact? Will it ever help you in life to know that? Probably not. But it’s the kind of thing YouTube is built on. So let me ask you this question. What would help you in life right now?
Do you ask yourself some variation of that question everyday? What is most important for you today? Or do you jump straight into social media and emails, chasing your tail because it’s moving or following breadcrumbs others leave out for you? I am guilty of all of the above, especially when I’ve had a fight with my wife the night before (well at least I’m admitting it was a fight).
The truth is I had planned a much better blog post for today, it was going to be amazing. And then life happened. Now you’re stuck with my ramblings and the inside of my distracted mind.
One of my intentions for this year is to run towards imperfection. I have no idea what I’m going to write next. Hopefully it will be really punchy and make it seem like there’s a point to all this and I haven’t been leading you on.
I did tell you not to follow the white rabbit. So why did you open this article? Why do you open any article? Why do you think that just because someone is a connection or on the same platform as you that they will have something more relevant than anyone else? When was the last time you read a classical novel? Why do we spend so much of our time in little snippets of information hoping that we’ll garner some special insight because it’s shiny and new?
I wish people would read less of me and read more Socrates or Buddha or Einstein.
But yet my ego wants to be seen, I want to be influential, I want to feel like I’m making a difference. And maybe I am because Jesus never had to deal with the distractions of email and Facebook feeds and memes and dancing cats. He never got stuck on one of those top ten sites with with terribly interesting titles and squeamishly provocative clickbait that you only click on when you know no one is behind you.
That’s why Trump won the election. That’s why 18 year old “lovers” sit in front of each other in a cafe and instead of staring into each other’s eyes, are checking out each other’s feeds. Maybe none of it matters and Elon Musk is right and we’re all in a simulation, wait wasn’t that a plot line to some famous movie?
These devices, these websites, these apps are designed to distract us. Our attention = money to them. But what is your attention worth to you? Could you put a monetary value on one minute of your time? Should you? How much is a minute of your time worth to your child?
Who needs your attention right now more than this screen? What could you do to reach out to them? How can you make getting to the bottom of this article count? Instead of going back to your feed or switching to another app. What should you really be doing right now?
Get out of the Matrix. Wake up. There is no spoon.
P.S. How’d I do on the punchline?
Hey You – Awesome Human!
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