The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

by Michael Harris

  • • • • •

  Another week has passed—my War and Peace struggle continues. I’ve realized now that the subject of my distraction is far more likely to be something I need to look at than something I need to do. There have always been activities—dishes, gardening, sex, shopping—that derail whatever purpose we’ve assigned to ourselves on a given day. What’s different now is the addition of so much content that we passively consume.

  Only this morning I watched a boy break down crying on X Factor, then regain his courage and belt out a half-decent rendition of Beyoncé’s “Listen”; next I looked up the original Beyoncé video and played it twice while reading the first few paragraphs of a story about the humanity of child soldiers; then I switched to a Nina Simone playlist prepared for me by Songza, which played while I flipped through a slide show of American soldiers seeing their dogs for the first time in years; and so on, ad nauseam. Until I shook myself out of this funk and tried to remember what I’d sat down to work on in the first place.

  I’m a little like a character from one of Tolstoy’s other novels in this respect. In Anna Karenina, a few pages are devoted to his heroine’s attempt to read an English novel while traveling by train. She asks her maid for a lamp, hooks it onto the arm of her seat, takes out a knife to cut open the pages, and settles in. But the world around her begs her not to leave it.

  At first she could not read. For a while the bustle of people moving about disturbed her, and when the train had finally started it was impossible not to listen to the noises; then there was the snow, beating against the window on her left . . . and the sight of the guard, who passed through the carriage.

  Eventually, the clamor around her adopts a sameness—“the same jolting and knocking, the same beating of the snow on the window-pane, the same rapid changes from steaming heat to cold, and back again to heat . . . at last Anna began to read and to follow what she read.” Anna begins to read not because her environment has stopped shifting, but because it is the same quality of shift, and her brain can now ignore it.

  Anna read and understood, but it was unpleasant to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She was too eager to live herself.

  So, with me; the frisson of the Internet eventually blurs into a dull white roar, and I can return to my book again, sated. And so with me, my mind is jacked up by then to the point where staring at black lines feels ridiculous; there is so much living to live. I’m up and bouncing around after a few pages, realigning books on the shelf, dusting the blinds.

  If I’m going to break from our culture of distraction, I’m going to need practical advice, not just depressing statistics. To that end, I switch gears and decide to stop talking to scientists for a while; I need to talk to someone who deals with attention and productivity in the so-called real world. Someone with a big smile and tailored suits such as organizational guru Peter Bregman. He runs a global consulting firm that gets CEOs to unleash the potential of their workers, and he’s also the author of the acclaimed business book 18 Minutes, which counsels readers to take a minute out of every work hour (plus five minutes at the start and end of the day) to do nothing but set an intention.

  Bregman told me he sets his watch to beep every hour as a reminder that it’s time to right his course again. This sort of advice—so simple, so obvious—is the kind I usually delete from my memory banks immediately, telling myself that my problems are more complicated than that. (Besides, weren’t those watch beeps actually distractions in themselves?) But when I spoke with him, it became clear that his ideas actually were a complete departure from the place I’d drifted into. And that disturbed me even more: I saw that I’d swerved so far from what I knew to be sensible behavior.

  Aside from the intention setting, Bregman counsels no more than three e-mail check-ins a day. This notion of batch processing was anathema to someone like me, used to checking my in-box so constantly, particularly when my work feels stuck. “It’s incredibly inefficient to switch back and forth,” said Bregman, echoing every scientist I’d spoken to on multitasking. “Besides, e-mail is, actually, just about the least efficient mode of conversation you can have. And what we know about multitasking is that, frankly, you can’t. You just derail.”

  “I just always feel I’m missing something important,” I said.

  “And that’s precisely why we lose hours every day—that fear.” And sure, fear seems a good emotion to describe my state of distraction—that anxious fear that I ought to be doing something else (or that my life ought to have arrived somewhere else by now). Bregman argues that it’s people who can get ahead of that fear who end up excelling in the business world that he spends his own days in. “I think everyone is more distractible today than we used to be. It’s a very hard thing to fix. And as people become more distracted, we know they’re actually doing less, getting less done. Your efforts just leak out. And those who aren’t—aren’t leaking—are going to be the most successful.”

  I hate that I leak. But there’s a religious certainty required in order to devote yourself to one thing while cutting off the rest of the world—and that I am short on. So much of our work is an act of faith, in the end. We don’t know that the in-box is emergency-free, we don’t know that the work we’re doing is the work we ought to be doing. But we can’t move forward in a sane way without having some faith in the moment we’ve committed to. “You need to decide that things don’t matter as much as you might think they matter,” Bregman suggested as I told him about my flitting ways. And that made me think there might be a connection between the responsibility-free days of my youth and that earlier self’s ability to concentrate. My young self had nowhere else to be, no permanent anxiety nagging at his conscience. Could I return to that sense of ease? Could I simply be where I was and not seek out a shifting plurality to fill up my time?

  So I made a promise to myself. Every day there would be:

  Just three e-mail check-ins

  and, yes, definitely

  One hundred pages of War and Peace.

  • • • • •

  Today a friend called and invited me to a rooftop barbecue at his place in Yaletown.

  “I would, but I promised myself I’d get some reading done tonight.”

  A stretch of ten silent seconds. “Well, you’re an asshole. If you don’t wanna come, you could just tell me you have to wash your hair.”

  “I’m trying to read. I’m just trying to read a book. And I have to read eighty more pages before I’m allowed to sleep and I—”

  “What are you reading?”

  “War and Peace.”

  “For fuck’s sake. This whole better-than-the-Internet thing is getting seriously tired, Michael. Seriously. I guess just call when you’re ready to be part of the world again.”

  There is so, so much else in the world. But I stayed in another night with my book and grew angrier at its pages. It’s torture to stay still; it feels far beyond the powers of my tiny will. I once interviewed the tennis star Milos Raonic, and as we tooled around town in a chauffeured SUV, he told me he’d been trained to move so persistently that staying still now freaked his body out; airplanes were impossible. I told him I knew what he meant, except for me the problem was yoga classes—a still mind freaked me out the same way stillness upset his body. (Plus, I always think someone will steal my shoes when my eyes are closed.)

  I took to walking around the apartment while reading, so my brain might think I was on my way to do something else. A few days into that experiment, I met Dr. Sidney D’Mello, from the University of Notre Dame, who has a plan that might allow me to outsource my willpower onto a computer, making a piece of software the guardian of my attention span. I’m definitely listening.

  D’Mello can monitor real-time attention by using a $45,000 Tobii T60 eye tracker to see whether your gaze remains fixed on what you’re meant to be reading. His program has about an 80 percent chance of being correct when it assumes your attention has wandered and can t
hen prompt you by asking surprise questions about the material or even issuing smart-ass comments designed to reorient focus. When I spoke with D’Mello, he’d been working—through many trials and errors—for more than a year on this project. His next step has been scalability, getting his electronic blinders to work through a laptop’s simple webcam instead of through the expensive Tobii tracker. “The plan is that eventually anyone can download the software and it will work by monitoring your eye gaze through your computer’s built-in camera. It’ll also be sensing your heart rate by monitoring your skin color, and it would monitor your keystrokes, too, if you wanted to focus on writing. I see these webcams being part of a rich learning environment.”

  There are lots of other ways D’Mello and his team can track your engagement. They track your facial expression through those same webcams, they follow body movements based on sensor pads built into your seat, they time how long it takes you to answer questions. And these various inputs are synthesized so that an appropriate response—an alert, a cajole, a complaint—can be issued to the mind-wandering human. Et voilà! Instant attention.

  This would seem a little ridiculous if it weren’t for the fact that it does indeed work. Forty-eight people were tutored on four biology topics—two topics were delivered with a gaze-reactive computer tutor and two with a computer tutor that didn’t care where you were looking. The results, as written up in a recent paper of D’Mello’s: “The gaze-sensitive intervention was successful in dynamically reorienting learners’ attention patterns to the important areas of the interface.” Learners got more out of the text they were meant to be attending to, and, interestingly, the effectiveness of the gaze-reactive tutor was especially high when the aptitude of the learner involved was higher than average. D’Mello has become especially interested in the attention habits of “high aptitude” versus “low aptitude” learners and received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop intervention systems that spot potential college dropouts who lack the ability to remain alert during mundane academic tasks.

  This marks a tidy reversal in attitudes. Eye-tracking studies—using the same type of software D’Mello is incorporating—have proven many times over that when we read online, we read in a cursory way, we scan for information, taking in perhaps 20 percent of the words on a single Web page, often far less. Now it seems likely that we will invite our computers to rebuild our attention—though in line with what strict system of conduct, we must still wonder.

  But, then, what if I don’t want to use an algorithm to read War and Peace? I don’t want to employ eye-tracking software to keep me reading at some regulated speed of x words per second.15 I do not want to bandage a tech-induced problem with more technology.

  It came to me that the kind of attention I wanted to devote to War and Peace was the opposite of the robotic eye-gripping mechanism employed in A Clockwork Orange. My kind of attention may include long patches of staring out the window. Sometimes I’m thinking about the content of the book, and sometimes I’m staring blankly. Both feel valid. This means, though, that I need even more time set aside for reading, if I’m ever going to finish the goddamn Tolstoy.

  • • • • •

  It happened softly and without my really noticing.

  As I wore a deeper groove into the cushions of my sofa, so the book I was holding wore a groove into my (equally soft) mind. Moments of total absence began to take hold more often; I remembered what it was like to be lost entirely in a well-spun narrative. Increasingly, there were scenes that felt as overwhelming as the scene where Anna Mikhailovna begged so pitifully for a little money. More moments where the world around me dropped away and I was properly absorbed.

  A young, naïve Russian soldier, seeing the French rush toward him, cannot believe he is going to be killed.

  “To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?” He remembered his mother’s love for him, his family’s, his friends’, and the enemy’s intention to kill him seemed impossible.

  And then, later: After poor, fat, hopeless Pierre is imprisoned for a month in a shed and marched for weeks by a gang of French soldiers, this count, so used to life’s luxuries and instant gratification, finds that want, that lack, actually increases his pleasure of the smallest things—until he receives his glorious epiphany (which seemed to chime a little with the theme of my own book). Pierre sees

  not with his intellect, but with his whole being . . . that happiness lies within him, in the satisfaction of natural, human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from excess.

  And there was another moment like these, and another. A “causeless springtime feeling of joy” overtakes Prince Andrei as he recognizes a century-old oak that can still bring forth green leaves from beneath its scarred bark; a comet, taken as an omen of death by most, becomes to tearful Pierre a shimmering hope that traversed the vast nothingness of space only to deliver encouragement on his darkest night; Emperor Napoleon takes his troops into the heart of Russia, oblivious to the coming winter that will destroy them all; a distraught administrator in Moscow, abandoning his duties as the city is taken over, orders all the asylum’s madmen set loose in the destroyed city’s streets. And to all these evocative moments, Tolstoy adds passages of pure philosophy that move beyond the novel’s narrative; he takes the time to explain that kings are only the slaves of history, that “the so-called great men are labels that give the event a name, which, just as with labels, has the least connection of all with the event itself.” Each time I sat down to read, these big moments, ripe with meaning and sentiment, arrived sooner than the time before, and I lost myself in them with surer gratitude.

  It takes a week or so for withdrawal symptoms to work through a heroin addict’s body. While I wouldn’t pretend to compare severity here, doubtless we need patience, too, when we deprive ourselves of the manic digital distractions we’ve grown addicted to.

  That’s how it was with my Tolstoy and me. The periods without distraction grew longer, I settled into the sofa and couldn’t hear the phone, couldn’t hear the ghost-buzz of something else to do. I’m teaching myself to slip away from the world again.

  • • • • •

  This reminds me that real thinking requires retreat. True contemplation is always a two-part act: We go out into the world for a time, see what they’ve got, and then we find some isolated chamber where all that experience can be digested. You can never think about the crowd from its center. You have to judge from a place of absence.

  Think of Milton, who took a deep decade off when he graduated from Cambridge (cum laude) to read, read, and read. The year was 1632. Galileo was busy upturning the solar system; construction began on the Taj Mahal; Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp; and Milton sat down at his parents’ home, first in the village of Hammersmith outside of London and then at Horton (near present-day Heathrow Airport). Apparently, some of Milton’s friends were distraught that the bright young scholar was “giving up” his preaching vocation, for we see Milton responding in one letter: “You said that too much love of learning is in fault & I have given up my selfe to dreame away my years in the armes of studious retirement.” In the first draft of this letter, Milton includes for his antagonist a copy of his seventh sonnet, in which the poet berates himself for slacking off, too.

  How soon hath Time the suttle theef of youth,

  Stoln on his wing my three and twentieth yeer!

  My hasting dayes flie on with full career,

  But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th . . .

  Of course, that “dreame” in which Milton lost himself was anything but unproductive. His studious retirement was a kind of arming period, during which the young scholar mined a prodigious reading list for material that served him the rest of his life and found its way into all his great works.

  Steve Jobs touched on the value of such a “dreame” process in the commencement speech he gave at Stanford in 2005. Jobs told the crowd how he dropped out of colleg
e, slept on the floors of other people’s dorm rooms, and—since he no longer had to subscribe to a preordained course load—took a calligraphy class out of pure interest.

  None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. . . . Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

  It seems to me that Jobs, like Milton, had his own arming period, a time when the usefulness of what he was engaged by wasn’t called into question. When we’re without a particular prescription, we’re at ease to discover the things we didn’t know we needed to know. Without some faith in that unknown progress, distraction preys on our fears, on our ingrained belief that something—a predator, an exciting new e-mail—requires a nervous shift in attention.

  • • • • •

  Yesterday I fell asleep on the sofa with a few dozen pages of War and Peace to go. I could hear my cell phone buzzing from its perch on top of the piano. I could sense the e-mails cramming into my laptop, saw the glowing green eye of my Cyclops modem as it broadcast potential distraction all around. But on I went past the turgid military campaigns and past the fretting of Russian princesses, until sleep finally claimed me and my head, exhausted, dreamed of nothing at all. This morning I finished the thing at last. The clean edges of its thirteen hundred pages have been ruffled down into a paper cabbage, the cover is pilled from the time I dropped it in the bath. Holding the thing aloft, trophy style, I notice the book is slightly larger than it was before I read it.