3 ways distraction undermines the meaning of your life

Your life consists of what you have focused on, and what has distracted you, too.

For a few months, I’ve devoted most of my reading and study time to learning how focus and distraction change our sense of meaning in life.

You might ask what focus and distraction have to do with the meaning of life; isn’t that more about family and community? Here’s the connection.

I started this research around the time I celebrated my 40th birthday this summer. Reflecting on my life as one of the oldest millennials, I found plenty that is meaningful: family, faith, a career I enjoy, and creative accomplishments such as writing, directing and performing in plays. It has been a rich life.

But I also found regret. For nearly 30 years, my life goal has been to write one book after another. I fell short of that goal not for lack of time, but for giving my time to other things: making freelance websites on the cheap, posting puns on social media, playing apps and games, and putting most book projects on the back burner after just a couple of chapters.

In other words, I got distracted.

This reflection inspired my study of how focus defines our lives and distraction can redefine it. Here is a preview of three lessons I’ve learned.

Focus defines our lives

Winnifred Gallagher, the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, tells how a cancer diagnosis taught her the importance of focus. “This disease wanted to monopolize my attention,” she writes, “but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.”

Despite the setbacks and challenges she faced, her deliberate focus allowed her to continue with life rather than consume herself with worry. “Your life is the creation of what you focus on, and what you don’t,” she writes.

If attention creates your life, distraction, which takes attention away from the focus you choose, changes or even limits the meaning of your life.

Distraction reduces investment in our ability to change

Since my research was launched by reflection about my goals, I was intrigued by a 1999 paper by Abigail Stewart (University of Michigan) and Elizabeth Vandewater (University of Texas at Austin) about mid-life regrets and change. Using two studies that had followed college-educated women from their early 20s to their late 40s, they asked: did mid-life regrets help these women change?

Their paper found that the women who successfully redefined their lives in their 40s had shared a couple of traits in their late 30s, when they felt the twinge of regret. These women ranked low in rumination — brooding over the past — and high in “effective instrumentality,” defined as “a broad sense of personal efficacy coupled with a repertoire of coping skills and investment in life projects.”

Their study clarified that it would be futile for me to ruminate on my past distractions, and fertile for me to focus on what I have accomplished and invest more time in my goals.

Distraction dampens our feeling of personal efficacy and it beckons us away from life projects. It prompts us to ruminate on the past. By reducing investment in our chosen goals, it reduces our ability to redefine our lives when needed. 

Distraction interrupts the call of meaning

In Man’s Search for Meaning, a memoir of concentration camp life, the psychologist Victor Frankl describes how he found meaning by looking past his hardships and focusing on a future goal.

The goal he chose was to someday give lectures about the psychology of concentration camps. After he set this goal, he spent less time ruminating on the hardships and sufferings of camp life. He lay awake at night composing speeches. He mentally started rewriting a scientific manuscript that had been destroyed when he entered the camp. These habits of mind did not decrease the brutality and inhumanity of the camps, but they did change his inner experience.

“My deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps,” he writes.

Frankl shares that our sense of meaning comes from “the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task, …. the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled.” We need to “aim at an ultimate goal in life.”

Each of us experiences a tug in our hearts that says, “This is what your life could be about.” But distraction interrupts our quest for both short-term and long-term goals. If we yield to the interruption, we allow it to change the meaning of our lives.

What’s next: Science, meditation, U2 and more

In addition to the sources cited here, I’ve read and listened to books about the neuroscience of distraction and focus and watched documentaries about meditation. I’ve read scientific papers about how we spend our digital time, surveys about how we find meaning in life, and even an article about an improvised music video by U2. I promise they all connect.

Some of those connections will be made right here in Idea Link. Others I might hold for a book.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed one of the lessons I shared, please leave a comment below, or share this newsletter with someone who could benefit from these ideas.