I sat in a group team event last week, listening to a presentation about the trajectory of one of the most exciting technology companies in the world. Twenty minutes…. that was all it took before the fidgeting started, before hands (including my own), reached instinctively to check a device and you could feel the attention in the room wavering.

This was not an indictment on the content or delivery - which were both brilliant - but on a modern culture where brains have been reprogrammed to multi-task; one where we struggle to stay in the moment and where we are slaves to the allure of devices. My mother’s generation isn’t so afflicted, but mine certainly is and as I scan the room - a brilliant team who work remotely all over the world and come together in person only once every 18 months - I notice that it’s worse the younger people are. We may worry about how this is rewiring our children’s brains, but we also need to take greater responsibility for our own and the example we set. A chant starts up in my head ‘Con-cen-tra-tion… Concentration now begin… Keep in rhythm’ - a kid’s game but apparently now ripe for adult team-building.

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As I write, I have 102 tabs open on three browsers which I scroll between for different projects. Amongst them: 3 separate inboxes; a 40-channel Slack; 12 half-read articles; 5 half-listened-to YouTubes; 4 pdf reports waiting to reviewed; some half-baked product research; GoDaddy (because any idea that pops into my head can result in a rash url purchase); two conferences I’d like to attend; Trello, for tracking Christmas gifts and family-admin; 5 separate Linkedin tabs with posts I may or may not ‘like’; and (no-joke), the lyrics to a partridge in a pear tree. Let’s not even talk about my phone and the number of Whatsapps awaiting processing.

WTF am I doing? And how uniquely chaotic is my desktop? Why, mid-sentence here, do I feel a compulsion to quickly check if anything interesting has popped into one of my inboxes in the last 15 minutes? Quick scroll left, sign a birthday-party waiver, delete a marketing spam, add a football game to the calendar… and I’m back. The reason I record an audio version of this blog is so that it don’t sit in another tab to-read-later or fall down below the inbox fold. Perhaps my dulcet tones can be enjoyed at greater leisure, next time you’re in a car, walking the dog or doing a shop. Your time is precious. I don’t take it lightly.

Given that volume of content, how can we possibly give any of it proper consideration or find time to stop and process any meaningful conclusions? My tabs of potential knowledge-gems sit there contributing to mental overload in the same way that the physical detritus of our family life on every available surface stresses me out. It’s the content snorkelling habit analogy I’ve used before and I know it’s making me stupid and unproductive. Distraction is an illness and we’re all now afflicted.

In a moment of down time with my husband recently I had pause to reflect on my gallbladder… as you do. What even is it? Where is it? What does it do? It struck me that I recall *nothing* from school biology and haven’t ever given it a single thought. On musing this out loud, my husband and I both reached for devices. 7 minutes later, we know the answer - thank god - but at the cost of 14 cumulative minutes of our precious together time… x20 other such examples in any given week (where do I know that actress from? How do you stop your puppy eating s**t? Synonyms for ‘pondering’?) Christ. Cogitate on the cumulative nature of that and how much of it is utterly, utterly pointless.

Answers to anything and everything that pops into our heads are a tap away and this instant accessibility has dramatically altered how we think about and retain facts. Are the ones we yield on a quick search even true? (Pineapple in dog-food? Really?).

As an unwelcome byproduct, we seem to have utterly lost the art of pondering. Even modern toilet roll holders are conspiring against pondering-time with their phone-rest shelves. Maybe it needs a rebrand? To ‘broogle’ is one term I recently heard.. (brain-google - although admittedly it would have yielded little on the gallbladder).

And yet, to ponder is a critical life skill. To do so silently is to process the noise of modern life and come to our own conclusions (as opposed to someone else’s); and to ponder out-loud fosters deep connection through shared curiosity - remarkably effective given the rarity of volunteered-ignorance in an age of cast-iron opinions.

For children, it’s even more important. As Monica C. Parker writes in Time magazine (with thanks to Hannah Oertel for sharing this quote in her own fabulous blog),

“Rather than demonizing daydreaming, we should protect it, nurture it, honor it—if not for the raft of physiological and psychological benefits, then for the potential societal benefits. People who daydream are more reflective, have a deeper sense of compassion, and show more moral decision-making. And ultimately, children who are more reflective, compassionate, and moral grow up to be the adults who build a more just society.”

We ignore this habit at our peril. And there are worrying trends everywhere conspiring to exacerbate the problem: the disappearance of free play and boredom for children despite its proven power to build resilience and relationship-building skills; the decline of long-form hand-writing, despite its superiority to typing on brain-connectivity, recall and comprehension; the decline of challenging, longer-form reading in education; and with ChatGPT and AI, turbo-charging these habits still further. Most depressingly, ‘Brain Rot’ has just been revealed as the Oxford University Press’s word of the year

(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.

Yet still, the Antidoters persist.

A founder community I’m a part of ran ‘Ponder Wanders’ for a while. A wonderful idea where loosely-connected strangers would meet to take a stroll and discuss a selection of random topics at leisure. A friend has implemented something similar locally to alleviate loneliness and connect people in Hertfordshire. The Men’s Shed movement started in response to a recognition that men only really talk to each other when ‘doing something’ side-by-side: fixing, tinkering, playing golf etc. And the ‘unplugged’ movement is rapidly gathering momentum, with many phone-free events now popping up around the globe.

I believe that hope lies is something akin to an analogue renaissance. The buds are here and being cultivated by many of the innovators that have flooded my inbox since my After Babel blog with Jonathan Haidt (for which you can blame my blog inconsistency of late). I believe it to be some of the most important work happening in the world today.

Attention and focus is the new gold. I’d go so far as to say that it could become the next great soceital divide. Those kids with the ability to mine it and deep-dive will become our next leaders, leaving all others snorkelling subjects of the world they create.

And if we ourselves, still hope to make a dent, or at least calm our frazzled brains?… Con-cen-tra-tion…. Concentration now begin…. Keep in rhythm… Me. You.

Ponder on.

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A Ponder on the Lost Art of Pondering