Fitting that the major Asian languages don't have a distinct word for "distraction" like English does; the closest concepts have to do with body concepts like the heart or the spirit, or the mind. For example, in Chinese, it's literally translated to "splitting the heart," Japanese is "spreading the air," and in Korean it could be the spreading one's attention or chaos in one's heart.
Chaos, that's a fitting description for the distractions that surround us every day, especially with the Internet at the tip of our fingers. Every when I get up I feel like it's a race to cram as many things into my mind as possible, and I'm just jumping from one thing to another that gets my attention to another thing like a frog darting from one water lily to the next, never settling on one area long enough to digest it, make it home. No wonder so many people of my sister's generation (including my sister) have Attention deficit disorder or something related to that. Part of my job every day is to keep myself in check, focused on the task at hand, because any venture into the lands of Facebook, Youtube, or even my own email inbox can lead to 30 minutes of unscheduled unproductivity and disaster. (The secret, like smoking or other additions, is to not start in the first place and not even think about it.)
Easier said than done on a day like this week where the market made violent moves both positively (but more importantly) and negatively. That sinking feeling of losing money is primal, something that has been passed on through generations of humans, of trying to protect what we feel like we possess. No, I would not say checking my phone every 3 minutes to check stock ticker symbols like to see how far TSLA is down (violent move down 13% on no news yesterday) is a healthy distraction.
Luckily, there are actually healthy distractions! For example, I made notecards for studying Korean, a tried and true method of acquiring knowledge through rote memoriation. Whenever I feel like I need a break from something I'm doing, I look at a new word in the notecards and see if I know it. Only takes about 5 seconds, and I get the distraction I need and acquire knowledge from it. The key is to let your mind free to wander but wander to a good place of learning and knowledge, not a swamp of gossip, rumor, text chains, Tiktok videos, and knowledge that doens't improve our lives but like sugar, gives us a momentary dopamine hit and makes us feel good. Instead of taking a bite of a potato chip every 3 minutes, I take a bite of a carrot every 3 minutes. Same idea.
And really, "trivia" like the facts seen on Jeopardy are sometimes criticized as being trivial per its name, but I feel like the facts on Jeopardy and Jeopardy archive are so much more useful and non-trivial/significant than so much of the Internet, like what Zlatan Abrahamovic thinks of Lebron James (1000+, endless comments about that today because of the gossipy/high-school nature of the information, but I get much more use out of knowing that the Eerie Canal actually stretches through the whole state of New York from the Eerie Canal to the Atlantic Ocean, and people actually made that! Or that KLM Airlines is actually from the Netherlands (Royal Dutch Airlines), or that there was a real person named the Angel of Death during Nazi Germany (Joseph Mengele) who escaped justice for his war crimes to South America despite being tracked by Israel's CIA the Mossad, or that Knotts Berry Farm was named after the guy who created the boysenberry, Rudolph Boysen. Or that Amy Winehaus was compared to Janis Joplin in their impact to the music industry but their sad deaths at a young age. (MJ told me that!)
So not all distractions are built the same, and if you really need a distraction, Dr. Bobby prescribes the heatlhy carrot types of distractions in lieu of the potato chip unhealthy ones.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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