Age of distraction

Enter Firestone. Descend to the C-floor. Explore the myriad of carrels available. Curse myself once I sit down — there are no easily accessible plugs. Pull out computer. Check email and rue the day because I only have six emails, including Career Services’ weekly newsletter and another email from HPA Vitals, despite the fact I dropped pre-med two semesters ago.

Refresh email. Check Facebook. Few notifications. Scroll through a few of my friends’ profiles. End up on my friend from home’s boyfriend’s sister’s page. Immediately realize how creepy I am and go back to my newsfeed. Laugh at a meme and immediately follow the meme to its homepage. Look at six pages of memes, then realize that 34 minutes have passed. Curse myself. Take a last look at Facebook because clearly I can’t start work on the 34-minute mark. Allow myself until the 40-minute mark because that’s a wholesome number. See that Nicki Minaj’s new video is out, pull out headphones and watch. Look back at the clock.

Curses! It’s been 44 minutes! Power up SelfControl and pull out some reading. Realize it’s extremely boring after the first four sentences. Hate everything. Maybe listening to Childish Gambino will help me focus? Open up Spotify; make sure to hit “Private Session” so my friends won’t judge me for only listening to Childish after I found out he was coming for Lawnparties. Listen for a bit and try to do reading. Do not accomplish reading, so turn off Childish. Think that perhaps doing some writing instead of reading will help me focus. Stare at screen. Check phone. Text roommate to ask about her dinner plans. Put phone away. Pull it back out to see if she texted back.

Go back to readings. Think about dinner and how glorious it will be despite the fact that I am still full from brunch. Check email. More HPA. Think about dinner again. Cannot focus because fixated on food. Look at readings. Look at phone. Look at computer. Look at desk. Look at anything at all and do nothing. Decide this studying business is a worthless venture and leave Firestone.

We are a generation built on distractions. Everything is accessible with a click, so spending a lot of time on one thing is virtually impossible. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and all those things can certainly be used productively. In my journalism class, I learned how useful Twitter is as a news source and how Facebook allows us to spread important information rapidly. But I don’t use these sites and services productively. I post silly things about myself, photos and funny memes. I look at my friends’ profiles, which follow the same format. I mindlessly click photo after photo, going from one site to the next without realizing what I am doing.

We started doing this ‘clicking’ thing in the early years of high school, when Facebook was becoming the cool thing. So is it any wonder that our ability to focus is shot? We have trained ourselves to be distracted, and we have forgotten how to focus — if, that is, we ever learned how to focus in the first place.

I don’t know how my focus is compared to my parents’ focus. For all I know, they might have been as distracted as I am, but I would like to think that their distractions weren’t as useless as the countless memes I look through every day. I want to focus, and I want to accomplish something, but the Internet-click mentality always gets in the way. And to make things even scarier, it’s not exclusively the Internet’s fault. It’s mine.