Distraction is powerfully addictive. Some distractions feel like paying attention. Some distractions feel like flow. But they are not real in the same way this room is real, or my cat is real, or the breath is real, or my mom is real, or a forest is real. For my whole life, TV has been the single most time- and attention-consuming distraction. Many kinds of reading can serve as a distraction. The internet is a world-class distraction. Smartphones offer the opportunity to distract all day every day, at a nanosecond’s notice. 

I’m pretty old-school, so I’m more likely to turn on the TV than cruise TikTok. I grew up in the glow of the electronic babysitter, watching animated movies over and over until my mom and I both knew every word. As a kid, I had to fall asleep in front of the TV, and tossed and turned without it. This continued into my 40s. As a meditating adult, I turn the TV on for maybe an hour a day. When I see a stretch of unscheduled time (a rare weekend when I’m not super busy, a weekday that’s slow at work), the first thing I want to do is fill it up with TV. I used to drink and watch TV, and now I just watch TV. This is improvement. 

I don’t live much of my life online. I have a Facebook account that I use for maybe 30 minutes a week, and an Instagram account to follow the activities of the one friend who isn’t on Facebook. I have literally never been on Twitter or TikTok. If I have 5 minutes waiting in a doctor’s office, I am more likely to use that time to check in on Facebook and like a few posts than to meditate. I rarely post. When I do, I compulsively check for likes and comments. I feel the magnetic pull of this on my attention powerfully every single time. I have friends who post several times a day. Are they experiencing the same pull? When I think of what this constant posting and attending to the results must mean for my friends’ time and attention, I am kind of afraid for them. I hope they are still capably living the rest of their lives with things that are real. 

I am not a quippy internet writer. The very idea that I’m writing in a blog, first of all, is so 2010. And when I do write, I write essays of 500-1,000 words, not listicles that are heavily linked and loaded with multi-media enhancements to the content. But the very idea that I write for the internet is pretty absurd if viewed in the context of how I live my life. I do virtually nothing on the internet. There is a minimal amount of work I do that requires internet use, and I use it to look for things and buy things. I spend as little time here as I can.

I write for the internet, but the scale of my readership reflects my disdain for the internet. I would love more people to read this blog, but that would require an extensive investment of time in internet activity. Posting and attending to social media. Spending hours on Medium. Reading other blogs and other internet writing instead of reading books. Trawling for readership instead of petting the cat. I love this blog and want it read by people, but it’s very hard to accept that I would have to change huge parts of my life to make that happen. I would have to make sacrifices in areas of my life that actually generate the content for my writing. I would have to spend less time living life and meditating, and more time online. So far, that’s not a trade I can live with. It’s more important to have something to say. 

In his book about the internet’s impact on our culture, our humanity, and our very brains, Nicholas Carr writes in The Shallows, “Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to. Other times, we adapt ourselves to the tools’ requirements.” I grew up in the narrative world of season-long TV, the hours of investment in novels, writing that started one place and ended somewhere else. I’m a long-form thinker. I am unwilling to adapt to the internet’s quick bites, and that probably means my writing audience is limited to the handful of supportive friends and family that have kindly read what I put up here.

This week marks a year since I published my first post on The Funexamined Life. After dozens of essays and meditations, I am at a bit of a crossroads. Do I invest time in seeking new readership and expanding my audience? Do I write this blog off as an exercise whose time is drawing toward a close? It has brought me closer to several people who have been deeply kind, and because of that, it was worth every minute. I’m a planner, though, and what I have to admit is that right now, I have no plan for the future of my beloved blog.  

Preserving my individual mind from the ceaseless distraction of online life has turned out to be more important to me than using that profoundly distracting medium to try to draw others into a more contemplative life. The online medium is a deeply ironic vehicle for this analog message. I hope even a handful of people are curious enough about these weird online musings to put their smartphones down and breathe for a few minutes. I don’t know how you’ll find me, but I hope you do.