A capacity to focus and knowing how to self-contain are crucial to economic success (and increasingly just simply staying afloat) in the digital economy. At the same time, the lifestyles we lead are geared towards destroying focus and encouraging us to be raging, gushing fountains of emotion. Which makes focus and self-control even more rare and hence well-compensated. It’s not a conspiracy. Nobody is doing it on purpose. Gold is valued more highly than sand because it’s harder to find, that’s all.
We need to fight for our focus and self-containment ferociously. They are what will feed us. They will feed our children when they grow up. We should wage a war in our individual lives on emotional dysregulation, moodiness, letting work and private life merge and gush into each other, inappropriate emotional attachments to people who don’t know we exist, cultivating feelings of being oppressed or victimized, etc.
Clarissa's Blog 