Staying On Course

What gives you direction in life?

Maintaining course in life can be an arduous task given the amount of distractions that exists outside of ourselves starting from social media, to distracting other-people interactions, to nagging problems with every day life.

I am of the opinion that mobile screens are like black holes that suck us in and we lose touch with time while staying fully immersed and possibly invested by engaging in arguments with total strangers sometimes.

Other people interactions can be very distracting. I had no idea how intentionally reckless people are with the people that they interact with, most of it fueled by fragility of identity until I started living in my new location. Coworkers are intentional about getting each other fired and this one beats my imagination all the time because if a colleague gets fired, for a while, the fired colleague’s work will be moved to you but your pay will remain the same because the fired employee’s pay won’t be transferred to you. Do people never realize this?!

Romantic relationships can be very distracting as well especially when engaged with a rancorous partner.

Life’s pressing issues are life’s pressing issues. There’s no way to get rid of them. An erroneous thought is that money takes away the weight of life’s pressing and challenging situations. It doesn’t. Executive function seems to grow with increased finances and we subconsciously but actively increase our responsibilities to meet the new capacities. So money does not take away life’s pressures.

But of all these things, the distractions that come from within are the biggest ones of all. You know that saying that it’s only the water that gets into the ship that sinks it? This saying is true no matter the size of the ship. We are, in and of ourselves, our biggest distractions. Our thoughts, our habits, our preoccupations, our temperaments and all.

Something that I have learned in the course of steadying my attention when I have to prepare for my exams is that by the time we reach out to touch our phones or surf the internet, we are already distracted on the inside of our minds. Reaching out for the phone or any other activity outside of the target task is a manifestation of distraction rather than the cause of it.

Because of this, I have learned that disconnecting from poorly socialized people or putting up stringent rules for social media usage, or wishing for a smooth and stress free life is not the answer to staying on course. This is because we need our phones in the age where everything is digital (no individual’s ideology is going to alter or reverse this!), and we need people in our lives even though we are preoccupied with basic independence, and we need life’s stressors intermittently to help us grow our personalities and mental abilities.

Maintaining course in life for me is about managing my internal environment – thoughts, perceptions, meanings, associations, emotions, intuitions, interests, and passions. Remember when we talked about the water that gets into the ship? These things are the waters and high seas that can sink or threaten to sink your ship in life.

I have realized also that attention is now a very big market and I am inevitably a product in it. This is a phenomenon that Noam Chomsky referred to as “manufacturing consent” which basically means that we become participants without a chance to consent. Because most people are not familiar with this concept, they often move to get diagnosed with ADHD/ADD incorrectly in most cases.

I have written about attention stacking previously, a concept I developed to help me manage my attention. If you know the tasks that are essential for you to stay on course, surround yourself with mental conduits that leads to any of those tasks when your attention to one task diminishes. In essence, just because you have lost interest in a primary task doesn’t mean that you have run out of interest for another productive task. It may signal that you haven’t yet identified, prioritized and strategized them.

At the end of it all, we owe ourselves the primary responsibility of making sure that the radar and the rudder systems of our ships are properly calibrated and connected to each other.

How do you stay on course? Share!