Formed By Distraction

T. S. Eliot wrote the line "Distracted from distraction by distraction" in 1936, in a poem that describes commuters on the London Underground. He was describing men who are pulled off one thing by a second thing and off the second by a third, so that their minds never come to rest anywhere.

Eliot wrote before most families owned a television. We now carry what he described in our pockets. In a 2023 survey, Americans reported checking their phones 144 times a day, and in the next year's survey the number was 205. Those numbers are self-reported, so the real figure could be higher or lower. Either way, a man who checks his phone that often is interrupted every few minutes of his waking life, and he has been living that way for years. We usually treat this as a problem of willpower. We tell ourselves to put the phone down and try harder, and we feel guilty when we fail. Discipline matters, and I will come back to it this in a later article. For this article, I want to ask a different question.

Saint Paul writes to the Galatians, "My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!" This assumes that a man can be formed. If that is true, then a man can also be formed by the wrong things. So here is my question for now. If distraction forms us, toward what is it forming us?

SECTION 1: POWER WITHOUT FORMATION

Romano Guardini was a priest, theologian, and philosopher who was born in Italy and taught in Germany through both world wars. In the 1920s, he wrote a series of letters from Lake Como in northern Italy. He watched industrial technology arrive in the villages around that lake, and he saw that the way people lived with the land was changing. Older forms of work had kept a man in contact with what he worked on, the wood, the stone, the water, and the soil. The new technology put distance between a man and the world. Nature began to look like raw material waiting to be used.

After the Second World War, Guardini wrote The End of the Modern World and Power and Responsibility. His argument in those books is that modern man has gained more power over nature, over other people, and over himself than any generation before him, but he has not been formed to use that power well. Power has grown faster than wisdom, conscience, and self-command. Think about how this used to work. In most earlier ages, power came with a formation suited to it. A craftsman spent years as an apprentice before he worked on his own. A surgeon trained for years before he held a scalpel. A priest spent years in seminary before he heard a confession. The formation and the power arrived together, so that by the time a man held the power, he had been shaped to use it.

That order has broken. Today a boy can broadcast to thousands of people before he can drive a car, and no one has formed him for that kind of power. A man can carry into his bedroom a device that holds every temptation the world has ever produced, and no one has trained him to carry it. Consider what this means for a father. Most of us were handed this power as adults, and we are still learning what it does to us. Our kids are being handed it at eleven or twelve. If a grown man struggles to put the phone down at dinner, a boy whose habits are still forming has far less defense. And here is what we then miss: if the father has not been formed to use this power well, then he cannot form his son to use it well, either!

Guardini also saw that technology does not leave its users unchanged. A tool trains the hands and habits of the man who uses it. The machine order runs on efficiency, speed, and measurable output, and a man who lives inside it begins to value what it values. Silence starts to look like wasted time. Contemplation starts to look unproductive. A question that cannot be answered quickly starts to look like a problem to be avoided. Guardini died in 1968, so he never saw a smartphone or the internet. He did understand that a man is formed by the instruments he lives with.

SECTION 2: THE DAILY LITURGY OF DISTRACTION

The philosopher James K. A. Smith has argued that we are formed less by the ideas we hold than by the practices we repeat. He calls these practices liturgies, because they work the way liturgy works. They are repeated, they involve the body, and they are aimed at something, and over time they shape what we love. Matthew Crawford, a philosopher and motorcycle repairman, wrote about attention in his The World Beyond Your Mind, a related observation. He notes that the liturgy of the Church is one of the ways human beings have always trained their attention. Now we live in an age of “engineered distraction”.

So now we need to think about engineered distraction as a daily liturgy.

You wake up and reach for the phone before you pray. You check it at every red light and in every checkout line. You check it at the urinal (or is that just me). You scroll in bed, and the last light you see at night comes from the screen. These are repeated acts of the body, and each one is aimed at some end. It is training us for something. Compare that to the liturgy of the Church. A monk rises in the night to pray the psalms, and he prays them again at dawn, at midday, and at evening. The same words return at the same hours for a lifetime, and the repetition settles his attention on God. The Mass does the same thing for us on a smaller scale. We stand, kneel, listen, and respond, and the shape of the rite trains us to attend to one thing.

The phone has its own hours and its own responses, but its liturgy is aimed at the next thing, whatever the next thing happens to be. Aristotle taught that we become just by doing just acts and brave by doing brave acts. Habits come from acts. The Church received that teaching and built her whole understanding of virtue on it. So distraction does form us, because every repeated act forms a habit. The only question is what it forms us toward. I want to propose four answers.

SECTION 3: FORMED FOR REACTION INSTEAD OF CHOICE

First, distraction forms a man for reaction instead of deliberate choice.

Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes two kinds of acts. A human act proceeds from a man's reason and will. He knows what he is doing, he judges it, and he chooses it. An act of a man is something he does without that deliberation, the way he scratches his chin or shifts in his chair. Thomas says that only the first kind is properly human, because only the first comes from what makes us human, which is our ability to reason and to choose. It is a spiritual faculty.

A man formed by distraction performs more and more acts of a man and fewer and fewer human acts. A notification sounds and his hand moves. A headline appears and he is angry before he has read the story. An email arrives at nine at night and he answers it before he has asked whether it can wait until morning. His attention goes wherever the screen sends it. He moves from stimulus to response without the pause in which reason judges and the will chooses. That pause is where deliberation occurs, thus where the moral life takes place, where we are most human, and now this engineered distraction rips it from us.

The distracted man may believe he is free, because he makes choices all day long. He chooses which video to watch, which post to answer, and which link to open. Yet he does not see that most of those choices were arranged for him in advance, and he makes them without deliberating. Google A/B tested over 50 shades of blue before deciding which one would keep your eyeballs locked in the longest. Freedom in the Christian sense is the power to choose the good through reason. The Catechism puts it this way: “The alternative is clear: either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy” (CCC 2339).

A man who cannot stop and think cannot govern anything. We need to etch this into our souls, men.

This knee-jerk lifestyle makes him predictable, and the companies that design these systems depend on that predictability. If they know what will make him stop scrolling, what will make him click, and what will make him angry, they can sell that knowledge. Researchers at Cambridge and New York University studied what makes people react fastest. They analyzed about 2.7 million posts from news outlets and members of Congress on Facebook and Twitter. The strongest predictor of whether a post was shared was language about the political out-group, meaning the other side. Words about the other side drove sharing more than emotional language in general and more than moral language.

George Orwell imagined this in his dystopian novel, 1984. Every day, the Party gathers its members for the Two Minutes Hate. The face of the traitor Emmanuel Goldstein appears on the screen, and the crowd works itself into a rage. Orwell's narrator says that the horrible thing about the Hate was not that a man had to pretend to feel it, but that he could not keep himself from joining in. The Hate does not teach anyone anything. It trains them to react together in a dystopian liturgy. We do not need a Party to do this to us. We have built a system that does it because rage keeps us looking at the screen.

SECTION 4: FORMED FOR ANOTHER’S PURPOSE

Second, distraction forms a man for someone else's purpose.

When a service is free, the user is usually what is being sold. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, reported $134.9 billion in revenue in 2023, and $131.9 billion of it came from advertising. Advertisers pay for your attention. Every minute you spend on the platform is an eyeball inventory, and this holds for nearly everything on your phone in an app that you did not pay for. The game your son plays for free earns money from the minutes he spends in it. The news app earns money from the headlines you open. When your family sits in the same room with four screens, at least four companies are being paid for the attention that the people in that room could have given to one another. Ugh.

Two business ethicists, Vikram Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez, studied this business model and concluded that companies wrong their users when they design products to be addictive. They wrote that "the way in which social media companies addict their users is demeaning because of how social media platforms get users to provide the very data that will be used to addict them."

Everything you click teaches the system how to hold you longer.

Aristotle defined a slave as a man who belongs to another, so that his work serves another man's purpose instead of his own. I want to be careful here. No one at these companies set out to enslave anyone (hopefully). They set out to make money, and they measure success by engagement. A man's life can still be ordered by purposes he did not choose, whether or not anyone intended it. If his attention is spent day after day on purposes chosen for him by someone else, then in that part of his life he belongs to another. That is Aristotle's definition, and it does not require a plot or conspiracy or the Illuminati.

Matthew Crawford argues that our crisis of attention is only partly about technology. It also comes from a modern idea of freedom, which says that a man is free when nothing outside him makes any claim on him. Paradoxically, the individual who rejects all prior commitments is left entirely defenseless when the market asserts its demands on him, since he now possesses no higher loyalties or grounded commitments with which to resist. Crawford compares attention to clean air and clean water. It is a resource that everything else in life depends on, and it is being taken from us. He also points out that quiet has become something you have to buy. Think of the airport, where the noise and the screens are free and blaring constantly, and yet the quiet lounge costs money. In his words, "If you want your attention back, you're going to have to pay for it."

The man formed for another's purpose has been made spiritually frictionless. He has few deep roots, few fixed commitments, and little quiet in which to notice that he is being worked on. His desires can be conditioned and his fears can be stirred. Guardini warned in The End of the Modern World that modern power tends to produce what he called the mass man (der Massenmensch), who is easy to direct because he has no inner reflective center. He has lost his interiority. The market has found that the same man is easy to sell to. Rootlessness means they can sell a man his identity, branding him for life.

SECTION 5: FORMED FOR FRAGMENTS

Third, distraction forms a man for fragments.

Everything deep in a man's life requires long attention. Mastering a trade requires it. Reading a hard book requires it. Prayer requires it. Marriage requires it most of all, because a covenant is a promise kept across decades, and keeping it means attending to one woman long after she is no longer novel. The habit of being present and being attentive must be trained and is a perishable skill.

Distraction trains the opposite habit. It teaches the mind to expect a new thing every few seconds and to grow restless when the new thing does not come. A man trained this way can skim almost anything, but he struggles to stay with anything. Try reading a chapter of Scripture after an hour of scrolling, and you will feel it. Your eyes keep moving, but your mind will not settle, focus, and attain wisdom. A man in that state can gather a thousand fragments, but he cannot put them together into a coherent understanding of the truth. As my son pointed out, “You know two lines to a thousand different songs, but not one song all the way through.” It is true!

This matters in a marriage more than anywhere else. Your wife does not need a man who can take in a thousand pieces of information. She needs a man who can stay with her through a long conversation, through an illness, through a hard season with a child, and through thirty years of ordinary days. A habit of fragments makes a man worse at the one thing his vocation asks of him most. The Catholic intellectual tradition speaks to this exact phenomenon. Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes the virtue of studiousness from the vice of curiosity. Studiousness directs the desire to know toward what is worth knowing, in the right way and in the right measure. Curiosity, in his sense, is the same desire running loose, an appetite for novelty for its own sake.

Underneath curiosity, Saint Thomas sees something more serious. Following Pope Saint Gregory the Great, he names acedia as one of the capital sins. Acedia is usually translated as sloth, but it does not mean laziness. It is a sorrow or weariness toward spiritual good, a heaviness of heart before the things of God. A man with acedia is actually very busy. He may work long hours, answer every message, and fill every evening, because busyness lets him avoid the one thing he is reluctant to do, which is to stand still before God and be seen as he truly is. Among the offspring of acedia, Saints Gregory and Thomas list the wandering of the mind, and Saint Thomas says that this wandering shows itself in restlessness, curiosity, idle talk, and instability. Each item on that list describes a habit the phone trains in us in its perverse daily liturgies of notifications and dopamine hits.

The great Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper argued that acedia is the opposite of real leisure. In his powerful book, Leisure: the Basis of Culture, he talks about the man with acedia cannot rest, because rest would bring him face to face with what he is avoiding. That leads to the fourth answer.

SECTION 6: FORMED FOR FLIGHT

Fourth, distraction forms a man for flight from himself.

Blaise Pascal, writing in his Pensée (# 139), said: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal thought that men pursue games, hunting, conversation, and business so that they will not have to think about their condition and confront the truth of their own lives. They are running from the thought of their own death and their own misery. Pascal called this running diversion. Diversion works like an anesthetic. It does not heal anything. It keeps a man from feeling what is wrong. The reason a distracted man cannot stand silence is that silence would make him feel it.

Numbness is the goal of diversion.

Let us test this. For the next 15 minutes get silent, still, and be alone. Sit in a chair and do anything. Just notice what happens in you. Some of you felt a phantom vibration of their phone in their pocket. Some of you started planning what you will do after this 15 minutes. Some of you felt something heavier that you would rather not name and pushed it away. That last feeling is the one I want to talk about.

What would a man find in that silence if he stayed in it? I think he would find debt. He would find the accumulated weight of what a man owes to God, to his family, and to his own soul, and has failed to pay. When the noise stops, a man has to look at three ledgers.

The first is his debt to God. When the Church prays the Our Father in Latin, she says dimitte nobis debita nostra, which means "forgive us our debts." In Luke's Gospel, the same prayer makes the meaning plain: "forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us." Sin is debt. A distracted man can ignore unconfessed sin for years. He drifts away from regular prayer, and he make small compromises he never examines, because the noise never stops long enough for him to see them. Silence stops the clock. It opens the ledger and shows him where he has broken covenant with God and where he needs mercy.

The second is his debt to the people in his care. A man can provide a house and a paycheck and still owe his wife his attention and owe his children their formation. Saint Paul writes, "Owe no one anything, except to love one another." Saint Paul names the one debt that is never paid off. Distraction lets a man substitute provision for presence. He tells himself he is a good husband because the bills are paid, and he never has to notice that he has not looked his wife in the eye in a week or prayed with his son in a year. In the quiet, he notices. Many men know this moment. It comes on a long drive with the radio off, or in a hospital waiting room, or at a father's funeral. A man suddenly sees the years he spent half present, and he cannot get them back.

The third is his debt for his own existence. Our culture tells a man that he is self-made and owes nothing to anyone. Saint Paul asks the Corinthian Church, "What have you that you did not receive?" Your existence, your mind, your health, your time, and every grace you have received were given to you. Saint Thomas teaches that the virtue of justice gives each one what he is due, but that we can never give God or our parents an equal return, because what we received from them is too great to repay. This debt cannot be paid off by effort. It can only be answered with gratitude and with the gift of oneself.

Distraction lets a man believe that his accounts are settled and his life is his own. Silence shows him otherwise. That realization is painful, and it is also a mercy, because the man who sees his debt is the man who goes to his knees and to the confessional.

So slow down. Get still. Be silent. Sit in solitude. These S’s are the only confrontation you need.

Find out when confessions are heard at your parish this week. Decide which time you will go, and tell one person in your life. If it has been a long time, that is all right. The priest has heard it before, and the debt you bring him is the one Christ came to forgive. God loves the worst sinner who ever lived. Chances are, that is not you, so that means of course God loves you. You are not your sin or your debts. As Saint Pope John Paul II said, we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son Jesus.”

SECTION 7: A SETTLED HABIT OF RESTLESSNESS

I said at the beginning that distraction forms us. Someone might object that a distracted man looks unformed, because he seems scattered and without any shape at all.

Saint Thomas helps here as well. One of the vices he lists under the wandering of the mind is instability. A man can be formed into a settled habit of being unsettled. He does have a form, and the form is restlessness. He cannot stay with a position, a book, a prayer, or a commitment, and you can count on that inability the way you count on any other habit. Psalm 115 describes the idols of the nations, which have mouths that do not speak and eyes that do not see. Then the psalmist says, "Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them." We become like what we look at. Matthew Crawford makes the same point when he argues that attention shapes the self. A man who looks all day at a feed that never holds still becomes a man who cannot hold still.

Our schools have often made this worse. Ryan Topping, in his introduction to Renewing the Mind, a reader in the philosophy of Catholic education, writes: "Education is and always has been a battle between the gods." He also writes that "to educate is to act, and to act is to work from the basis of some principle stated or implied." Every school serves some principle, whether it names one or not. If the principle is a career, the student is formed to be useful. If the principle is an ideology or cause, the student is formed to be loyal to a tribe. The French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, distinguished the primary aim of education, which is forming a person in wisdom and virtue, from its secondary aims, which include preparing him for work and for civic life. When the secondary aims swallow the primary one, a young man leaves school able to do a job and to hold the approved opinions, with no transcendent identity, no settled sense of what his life is for. Therefore, that young man has no defense against the feed. He was never given a form, so he takes the shape of whatever holds his attention.

It is worth asking yourself what you were formed for.

Most of us were told in school that the point was a good job. Few of us were told that the point was to become wise, or to become a saint. A man who was formed only for a career will look to his career for his identity, and when the career disappoints him, the feed is waiting to fill the space.

CLOSING

So toward what does distraction form us? It forms us for reaction instead of choice. It forms us for someone else's purpose. It forms us for fragments instead of depth. It forms us for flight from God, from our families, and from ourselves. And it forms all of this into a settled habit of restlessness. Saint Augustine wrote at the beginning of the Confessions, "Our heart is restless until it rests in you." Distraction does not destroy that restlessness. Our restlessness is a sign that we were made for God. Distraction captures it and feeds it substitutes, one after another, so that a man is always seeking and never arriving.

Picture a man at his own dinner table with his phone face up beside his plate. His wife is talking, and his children are at the table. He is answering a message from work, checking a score, and half listening to all of them. He is present everywhere in fragments and present nowhere in full. Christ is present in full. He is wholly given to the Father and wholly given to us, and the Church believes that he is wholly present in the Eucharist we will receive at the Vigil Mass this evening.

In your personal reflection or in community with other men, ask the honest question of where this is happening in your own life. Keep the question of debt with you through the week, and bring it to confession. In the next article, we will ask what it means for Christ to be formed in you, and what a man looks like when his form comes from Christ instead of from the feed.

SOURCE NOTES

Topping, "Education is and always has been a battle between the gods": Ryan N. S. Topping, ed., Renewing the Mind: A Reader in the Philosophy of Catholic Education (CUA Press, 2015), Introduction.

Bhargava and Velasquez quotation: "Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction," Business Ethics Quarterly.

Meta 2023 revenue: Meta Platforms Form 10-K, fiscal year 2023 (total $134,902 million; advertising $131,948 million).

Phone checks: Reviews.org cell phone usage surveys (144 per day in 2023; 205 per day in the following survey; self-reported, 1,000 U.S. adults).

Crawford, "If you want your attention back...": MPR News interview, April 30, 2015. Crawford's thesis that the crisis is only superficially technological comes from the publisher's description of The World Beyond Your Head, and his mention of liturgy comes from the Commonweal review.