Distractions: A fact of Life

December 31, 2007

Question: Do you still celebrate your birthday with gifts? Vote on the poll on the right please! Thank you for your participation!

Isn’t life just full of distractions? First, to better understand where I’m going with this, let us look at the definition of distraction. I like to use Google definition, they always have the most definite definitions.

Google defines distraction (from wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn) as:

• mental turmoil; “he drives me to distraction”
• an obstacle to attention
• beguilement: an entertainment that provokes pleased interest and distracts you from worries and vexations
• the act of distracting; drawing someone’s attention away from something; “conjurers are experts at misdirection”

I tend to like the third one up there. An entertainment, it says. That is quite true in my case. I have spend the past couple of weeks mostly enjoying my Playstation Portable wreaking havoc in GTA (Grand Theft Auto; A game where you play the role of a mobster.) I wanted to start reading, but I didn’t because I was busy playing the game.

I wanted to write down some ideas, get started with some tutorials I have waiting for me, and maybe start writing some code and playing around with software. I didn’t do that because I was busy playing that video game. Not only that, I was also watching some movies and anime. Some of you may think, why is this a distraction? It is normal to want to play and have fun when you have nothing better to do. Here, the real question is asked:

What are they distracting me from?

For those who have these items in their plans, then we can consider them a part of the plan, and not really a distraction. For someone like me, who has other plans in mind, I could call these a distraction. For a person who does not have writing and reading as part of the plan could call those specific actions distractions. We can see here that a distraction, is something that draws our attention away from our original plan.

All around us there are distractions of all types. Entertainment does not end, you can never run out of music, movies, video games, TV shows, TV programs, games, devices, gadgets, books, places to go, things to do, people to talk to, web sites to visit, things to download, etc. How many of these are distractions, and how many are quite necessary for our plan, whatever our plan may be?

What distractions do you have in your own life? How do you deal with distractions?

Posted in Philosophy, Question