The map on my phone can get me home in eleven minutes, and it has no way of knowing why I would rather take twenty-six.
An old question
We tend to imagine that our attention was once whole and has only recently been broken. The historical record is less flattering. Monks complained about wandering minds in the fourth century, and Victorian doctors worried at length about the nervous strain of railway travel and the penny post.
The fastest route has never once shown me anything.
What we lost along the way
What has changed is not the temptation but the scale of the engineering that opposes us. A single distracted monk had only himself to blame. We are distracted by thousands of intelligent people who are paid to understand us, and who have rather a lot of data about what works.
Against the easy conclusion
The remedy usually offered is individual discipline: delete the app, buy the notebook, take the retreat. These things are pleasant, and I have tried most of them. But they treat a shared condition as a private failure, and they leave largely untouched the ordinary rhythms of a working day.
I do not have a conclusion, and I distrust essays that arrive at a tidy one. What I have is a practice: one hour, a book, a chair that faces away from the door. It is small, and it is not a solution. But it has reminded me what it feels like to finish a thought.
