Distraction

It seems that every time I leave my 10:50 class on Mondays and Thursdays, my heart is beating out of my chest and my anxiety is through the roof. I cannot believe that our society has really gotten to the point it is at now. It is both terrifying and mystifying that a person such as Ted Kaczynski sees blowing random, innocent people up in order to get his point across, his ideas noticed. Why are humans so distracted? Why are all of our ideas simply blended together?

We as a society have been come distraction driven. Klosterman says “works of this variety sometimes experience massive spikes in popularity at the time of their release, but the shelf life is short.” I can relate to this. When I am sitting in class, I am flabbergasted at what our world has come to. I scribble side notes in my notebook saying “read newspapers”, “stop watching jersey shore”, “tell people to stop giving into technology and letting it dumb us down”. While I am in the moment, in class, with a Professor there to stimulate my mind, I am pumped. I experience this sudden feeling that I have to change something in my life. Yet, as soon as I walk to the library after class, it is erased from my mind. The shelf life of those ideas is indeed short.

A mere forty five minutes ago, my class was talking about how Facebook is used as a distraction. How the desire to get away from doing our work results in us finding out what our friends, peers, even strangers are doing while we should be doing work. While I was sitting in class, I thought to myself, “Wow, that really is crazy that that is what we look to do. I can’t believe people can’t control simply not typing the work “facebook.com” into the URL.” Yet here I am, in the library, about to post a blog and what do I type in? Not blogger.com. No, instead I type in Facebook. It took me a good five minutes of browsing through my newsfeed to realize “Holy shit, how is this happening?” It has almost become an instinct. I do not even think about what I am typing, or looking at. Distraction has become the norm.

Klosterman also says “Technology is a more powerful force than the desire for freedom.” I am really starting to see the truth in this statement. Rather than using my freedom to go to my blog and express my own feelings towards something I read. I chose to use the internet to do what everyone else is to, to see what everyone else is to, and to give in to the one thing I was criticizing less than an hour ago. It seems absolutely crazy. I lose my head in the technology. I think one thing then act upon another. I lose my track of thinking. And then what?...I guess it’s time to go back to Facebook.