It’s a common refrain that attention spans in general have been decreasing for the last century or so. Whether or not this is specifically true isn’t especially important.

First, let’s define what an attention span is. An attention span is an inclination, a habit, and a tendency. If a person has a short attention span, they start to feel uncomfortable after a short period of concentration on a task.

The notion of a general attention span is probably mistaken: an auto mechanic is probably capable of long periods of intense concentration to determine what’s wrong with an engine, but probably has a short attention span for studying complex insurance law.

If people as a whole are struggling to find time to focus on what matters to them, it probably results more from early conditioning than from other factors. A common thread through John Taylor Gatto’s writing on compulsory education concerns the frequent interruptions that educational institutions subject young children to when they’re switching topics.

Children attend shallow classes lasting for between 30 minutes to an hour or so each day, at which point the bell rings, and then the subject changes. Homework assignments will be shorter or longer, but any student will have to juggle many different topics from entirely different fields of knowledge in order to complete them.

It’s probably not a coincidence that TV programs tend to have a similar length to class periods. All TV producers know that their audience will probably have a shared background of compulsory schooling, so they’ll be accustomed to focused periods of approximately that time.

This differs from what’s actually required from skilled workers or thinking people, who are expected to focus on particular problems with great intensity for hours, days, months, or years at a time.

Because the training complex produces such people mostly by accident rather than design, the working world tends to be filled with people who are constantly scheduling distractions, meetings, and time-wasting presentations laden with graphics in order to create periods of artificial time pressure and deadlines to ensure something resembling work gets completed.

The root of this encouragement of fragmented attention is in the political ideal of equality.

Intellectual equality is impossible to establish. Given a mission to establish equality among students, schools adjust protocol to fudge a result that looks like limited success.

To achieve this, schools train students to be distracted and uncomfortable with the long periods of focus and daydreaming that otherwise arise in many people. This prevents individual students from pulling ahead of the herd unless they fall out of line.

If most of the students graduate with mediocre levels of knowledge and skill, that’s less important than if they are all within the same general range of mediocrity. Excellence in anything requires focused practice — when an athlete shows exceptional talent, schools may break some rules to accommodate their longer and more intensive practice hours.

Encouraging such deliberate practice, focus, and the sorting of the capable from the incapable necessarily undermines equality within the greater body of students. In a democracy which is supposed to encourage universal political participation with equal standing for all, this can only be tolerated to the extent to which it’s absolutely necessary.

Permitting this sort of specialization always causes serious ‘disparate impact’ to emerge: women and men will succeed in different areas, different racial groups pull ahead or behind, and some of the duller or more aggressive types are too useless for any responsibility whatsoever.

Training internally fragmented people creates a more similar populace which is less separated into the disparate specialties from which many of our surnames derive. With some help from scientific management, the baker can be interchangeable with the candlestick maker, and the son of the dentist can be encouraged to pursue his dreams to become a circus juggler. This emphasizes the larger political narrative that all people are interchangeable and that all people can determine their own fates if they have good school attendance and study hard enough.

Social media and schooling

The most successful and profitable social media platform derives from the academic social setting. Facebook emerged as a copy of an inferior Harvard facebook website that made it easy for students to message each other privately and in groups. It’s like a school yearbook that updates itself continuously — even after school ends.

Because compulsory schooling is the one social experience that most modern people hold in common, modern people feel uncomfortable when they’re jarred from that particular social setting. Technology permits people to contain their attention to the cycle of interruption and chatter that they’ve become conditioned to expect from their entire lives.

The interruption is a source of comfort because concentration takes a physical exertion. Preventing concentration maintains a sense of anxious comfort — and a realization that there may be nothing all that important to concentrate on, which can be disquieting in and of itself.

Like many elements of modernism from art to industry, services like Facebook and Twitter break down what the media accomplishes into its base elements: a source of gossipy distraction mixed with artfully crafted advertisements. The constant distractions are more important than the content of those distractions. Once the attention is served, advertisers can then capture some of the value of that attention by appealing to some latent desire or another.

What this tendency makes for is a people less capable of deliberate exertion, who are more aimless in their behavior, who are incapable of profound conversation, who speak in a shorthand of multi-megabyte images rather than in the bits and bytes of speech.

This common acclimation to constant focus switching has made it more challenging to do serious work or to engage in serious conversation about much of anything beyond whatever the current herd obsession happens to be.

When college professors complain that their students would rather check their smartphones than pay attention to the lectures, they’re missing that their students are adapting to the conditioning that their schooling has provided from an early age onward. If you wanted students to be capable of deep focus, you would raise them to develop that focus, rather than constantly distracted by shallow factoids and highly stimulating media.

It’s also difficult to communicate to any such audience, even of educated people, because the common body of knowledge which a speaker could once assume to be present will not be present.

On the individual level, it’s difficult to break the addiction to constant interruption once it’s in place. The benefit of going into withdrawal is an increased ability to perform any of the tasks that you do choose to focus on uninterrupted and undistracted.

Someone else in the household watches a lot of cooking shows on the weekends, so I’ve been seeing this ad for California tourism a lot lately.

Having lived in California for a little while, I’m familiar with the places and visions they’re promoting. What’s interesting about this is that there’s not a single non-white person in the ad. And that makes sense, because the upper middle class California has virtually no interaction with non-whites. One of the chief reasons why they love shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s is because of what kind of person operates the check-out.

California is 39% Latino, and the census probably under-counts that proportion due to illegal immigration. But no one in the rest of the country really wants to visit Latin California. They want to visit fantasy Whiteopia California. Napa Valley is not an especially ethnically vibrant vacation destination. It’s an ersatz Southern France.

In terms of real, lived social experience, California liberals want to live in the San Francisco neighborhoods where they’re surrounded by people like them. They want to move to ethnically uniform enclaves like Menlo Park. They want to live in Santa Monica where their neighbors look like the flat-bellied bikini blonde. They don’t want to live near pear-shaped peasants from El Salvador. They want you to live near them.

A lot of people don’t really get the joke about mass immigration. The immigrants are there to drive down the price of labor and to fill the voting rolls. They’re kept far away from the places where rich (and striving) Californians actually live or want to live. They’re meat for them to use, of no particular value beyond their political and economic utility.

For this reason, propaganda lines telling white liberals to “love their race” are stupid. They already do. They love their race more than you love your race. That’s why they work so hard to live near the Presidio. They import the other people to use against people like you, to keep you from climbing up to where they are. They have a firmer understanding of who their friends are and who their enemies are. That’s why they’re effective at maintaining their own positions. They play the game to win.

Is it stupid? Yes. Will their magic kingdom crumble? Yes. But appeals to unity which transcends class and real political interests will never hit their marks.

By “Agenda,” I mean your personal agenda — the tasks that you set for yourself to accomplish by the end of the day. Do you set that agenda, or does someone else?

Because of the way that our minds work, we can only hold so many ideas and trains of thought in our mind at the same time. When you start your day by bathing in whatever story some other unfathomable confluence of interest groups has decided to bathe you in, you cede control of your life — as you actually live it — to someone else.

You’re, by no means, immune to this in any social context or in any system of government. Civilized men are not especially isolated creatures. It’s important for us to understand what’s going on in our communities and areas of interest. This tendency of ours — the social instinct — has been ably hijacked by ‘user interface designers,’ software developers, and hacks like yours truly to keep people on a never-ending loop of checking what other people are thinking and doing in the moment. Joining that group are television producers, movie people, magazine editors, and all the rest of them eager to buy a slice of your thoughts.

Simply disconnecting from the larger herd — and perhaps focusing on the smaller herd of your family, or even of the people whom you need to work with throughout your day — is a better way to take control of your thoughts, and by taking control of your thoughts, you’ll have better control over your actions. When you have more control over your actions, you also have more control over your environment.

Exercising this control is something that I sometimes struggle with, personally, because of a bottomless curiosity and desire to understand the world as it is. But to be free in a meaningful sense is to be comfortable being ignorant about the majority of what exists. Most people in the world speak in languages unintelligible to us, in a social context completely alien to our understanding. It’s easy to fool ourselves that we understand — or that we can understand — because we can use simple theories, encyclopedia articles, and newspaper reports that go through several cycles of translation to think that we know what’s going on beyond our area of awareness.

Proactively deciding what to be ignorant about is probably more important than deciding what you ought to know. It’s by ignoring most things that you generate the free mental space and time to grasp what you actually need to know.