Clarissa's Blog

I received an anonymous question about focus and how to rescue it from screens and the phone addiction. I’m very happy to answer it because the battle for focus is the most important struggle of our times.

The neoliberal subjectivity is fragmented and scattered to the point where you almost don’t have an inner world of your own. Whatever is happening on a screen is so much more vivid and exciting that you prefer to live there than in your own mind. This is going to get really hairy for the kids who never lived in a world without handheld screens and never got to develop their own subjectivity. We will all pay dearly for raising a generation of humans who are projected completely outwards because they never developed their interiority. For one, this makes people extremely unstable psychologically and unhealthy mentally. Also, it makes them very prone to embrace totalitarianism. But that’s a different topic.

In a series of posts I’m starting today, I want to share some suggestions on how to preserve our inner world from the assault of screens. The only place where focus can exist is in there, but we have lost the map of how to get there. The focus posts are the directions.

Here’s the activity I suggest to kick off the series.

The Dolphin Exercise

Imagine that you are at the beach and all of a sudden you see a group of dolphins. They are so cute and they are jumping out of the water right in front of you. Your first impulse is to grab your phone and take pictures or videos. Resist this impulse. Breathe deep. Don’t place an object between yourself and the dolphins. Watch them, enjoy them, have an unmediated, unrecorded experience.

Try to do this with other experiences. Watch your kid sing in the school choir. Look at a sunset. Enjoy the light show at the local zoo. And take zero photos or videos. Make the moment completely your own. You don’t need to share it. You don’t need anybody else to witness you having this experience. It’s valuable because it’s yours. As you watch the dolphins (or a performance, a snowstorm, whatever), concentrate on how you feel about what you see.

This seems like a small thing but all of these exercises will be like that. Small steps will take us to our goal of dramatically improving our focus.