Towards a Program for the Resurrection of Focus

I can barely finish a book anymore, and I've had enough.

“No, I just said, that was something I did in my 30s and it wasn’t perfect and I wouldn’t do it again.”

“A Macbook Pro looks like a luxury, sure. But you learn that luxury is the only luxury you have.”

***

I’ve studied business grifters for the bulk of my adult life now. It was inevitable that, like any tortured detective staring directly into the souls of these Hannibals Lecter for hours on end, years at a stretch, I would some day cross over – lose my sense of self, and join my quarry.

It was inevitable that I would myself by osmosis become The Most Dangerous Game:

An online life coach.

I think I’ve finally identified a niche that could support some kind of pyramid-shaped structure for selling training materials and online video seminar packages across the country, across the whole world. I’m currently in hands-on development of a training program that will fix everything wrong with you (and make me wildly rich).

Because if you can’t tell from all the above gibberish, my focus is fuuuuucked folks. Specifically, my ability to pursue sustained intellectual inquiry and sharp thinking.

I’m ready to unfuck it, and get back to the Big Work, and I feel like I’m not alone.

**

See, here’s the thing with me, and I’ll try to keep it short.

I used to do all the reading.

I didn’t realize this wasn’t what everyone else was doing until I was most of the way through my PhD. I mean like, all the reading. Difficult stuff. And of course I’ve written two books at this point, if you count my dissertation and one I self-published (let me have this).

The reading thing pretty much came – well, not naturally, but it was a rational coping mechanism and real recompense for having basically no social life until my early 20s. Those habits of a high school geek died hard.

Then I got lucky on top of that: In my late 20s had to write a dissertation, and had an incredible year where doing that was effectively my job. So I had it easier than most of my peers, but the underlying, daunting task is the same for everybody: You have to create and manage and execute your own entire project from start to finish, on a (in practical terms) quite strict schedule.

I was fairly single at the time, and back to being not terribly social to boot, so it was a monkish year in which I developed a habit for routine, getting up and writing every weekday, like it or not, with nobody staring over my shoulder. And I once again did all the reading, but this time I assigned it all to myself.

That general set of skills – the ability to create and manage an intellectual agenda, to truly dive deep, to latch on, to unwind the complex and grasp its underlying structure – has propelled me onward and upward.

Until it began to escape me, or maybe I it.

**

On the other hand I also have a life now, have for a while, figured out how to be normal somewhere along the way. I am married and there are grand plans and to be in the world and of it is a massive weight that is bliss to heft.

I’m trying to pinpoint the moment, really, when I stopped inhaling massive philosophical tomes and exhaling weird conceptual theatre of the mind. Or even to pinpoint the symptoms. I think my last really deep work was probably the Finance as Time Travel series from early 2021.

I buy so many books I don’t read these days. They don’t even bother me that much. I’m not guilty that I haven’t read David Graeber’s final giant yellow tome, which lives in the storage footstool where I rest my legs while I’m watching a YouTube recap of a video game made in 1997.

THE STUPID PHONE

The phone is a major factor. No question. I check the feeds, and when I’m trying to read a book in particular, it’s a trap. You can fall through the earth, all the way to Mars.

But “stay off the phone” is a negative order, a restraint, and that’s not a very useful way to change any habit. The phone is not an attraction, it is what fills in for the lack of attraction. What has to be reconstituted is not will, but desire.

GO OUTSIDE

I reminded myself of a fantastic solution to the problem of The Stupid Phone today, in fact:  It’s beautiful in New York City right now, and with my wife safely accounted for, I spent an hour after work today sitting out back in warm shade, with my phone inside, reading.

I’ve realized that one of the things chipping at my focus year over year for the past several has been the sense that there must be something else to do than sit there with print in my face. The world is moving so fast, and I’m lucky enough to be right here in the middle of it, and what right do I have to stop?

BE IN SPACE

This may be the tip that’s least intuitive. Living in New York has led me to a habit of enclosure, of ensconcing. When you’re out and about, it’s genuinely fantastic (and I think probably good for your hearing) to have a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that block out the clatter and noise. That extended even to sitting in my own house with big cans on, blocking out everything.

But the headphones, and I would guess other sorts of isolating technologies, actually aren’t good for serious intellectual focus. This is so counter-intuitive it took me several years to figure out, and I still don’t have a good explanation.

But over the past few weeks I’ve been working towards, whenever possible, listening to music out loud, over my stereo. I know that’s an anachronistic  luxury a lot of younger people probably don’t have, but it’s a game-changer. The stereo, especially if you can play music from a tape or record instead of a phone connected via Bluetooth, is strangely disciplining.

It starts, I think, with the basic mandate of listening to something from beginning to end. The phone offers the constant promise of something other, something better. And it’s probably right there waiting to be messed with if you’re inside, and right next to your spotify is probably some trivial YouTube video you’ve half wanted to see for months, and seems much more appealing than some boring philosophy book in the moment of weakness when you’re picking different background music.

READ DUMB THINGS

What I was trying to read, at least for a bit when I went outside the other day, was Alice Knott, a recent novel by Blake Butler. Butler made his name, at least with me, as a writer of utterly psychedelic and sadistic surrealist horror, particularly with the insane 300,000,000. That was a book, discovered maybe four years ago, that I utterly loved but never finished. So maybe we can put that on the timeline of my declining focus.

On the other hand, both books are at the high end of the spectrum of abstraction. They’re as much poetry as novel, though Alice Knott does give you a lot more to work with. It’s what a literary novel would be if that label hadn’t been reduced to a synonym for “upper middle class soap opera” long ago.

But I guess I shouldn’t mock any group of writers for striving to be both accessible and intelligent, because that’s kind of where I ended up when Alice Knott threw me off for not the first time. I’m about 3/4ths of the way through now, and it’s really picking up, but at certain times of day you have to be willing to put down the Important Novel and read a sci-fi story.

Which is what I did when my attention wavered. Specifically, I opened up a collection of Brian Aldiss stories. And the thing you’ll discover is, even some pretty midwit-targetted writing, especially if it’s from a few decades ago, will still challenge and cultivate your mind.

STOP VAPING (Or Whatever)

This is where we get to the honestly pretty shameful part of the story. I “started smoking” when I was like 19, but for a very very long time I was some kind of cigarette unicorn: I only smoked one a day.

One cigarette per day for something like twelve years. I had it so good. Then I switched to the vape, because I don’t actually have a death wish and it seemed like the right way to step down.

Wrong! Trap card activated. The vape was a very workable step down for several years, but once I got to New York and things started to take off for me, it basically (as an old alcoholic would put it) started to get the better of me. After the pandemic hit, it was all over, I was chiefing on that thing nearly every waking moment, whether I was in my work nook covering breaking news or in my easy chair reading a novel.

The thing about nicotine is that it’s a stimulant, but at a certain point all the stimulation just leaves you exhausted. The vape was a massive drain on my energy and focus, among the top perpetrators.

I gather many of us have reclined into our own version of the vape over the last couple of years. Some narcotizing support that blunts the edges, while making us more deeply anxious because we know something is passing us by.

Easier said than done, but whatever your version of the vape is, ditch it. If yours is a physical addiction like mine, the best option is some mix of exercise and herbal tea. I got off the vape six months ago and it has done as much as anything to help me get back to feeling like my real, old self.

**

These are just a beginning. A few thoughts and tips and things that are, slowly and by steps, working for me. If this is a journey you find yourself on, I would love for us to undertake it together.

The unfocus of contemporary life is like a drug that stops you from seeing what’s right in front of your face, or controlling your own desires, or staying fixed on what is truly great and grand and important. Persistence, particularly in the face of challenge, is the problem of our time of superficial comfort and ease. We are constantly distracted not just from problems, but from possibilities. We have to get out.

If you’ve got recommendations of your own, I’d love to feature them here (with credit). Let’s do this.