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443 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 18 Mar \ on: The habits and rituals of fragmentation mostly_harmless
When I started reading novels again, I noticed my brain changing modes. There was actually a bit of a hurdle for my brain to settle into doing an uninterrupted activity like that. My work tends to be very fragmented, so it's a bit rare that I get to spend several consecutive hours working on something.
I was also thinking about this a bit while chatting with @siggy47 about his cruise. Whenever we go on a cruise, there's a noticeable adjustment to not rushing through things as though you have something else to get to.
Do you think there are benefits of being fragmented rather than present? Or is it just a new obstacle that we need to adapt to?
Do you think there are benefits of being fragmented
Yes. I wouldn't have discovered Bitcoin pretty early on if I hadn't had 'fragmented' attention. I tend to read fairly widely and follow tangents that interest me and the focus of my interest shifts around from day to day (although I do still have abiding interests). And my mind was already 'pre-prepared' for receptiveness to Bitcoin when I did first come upon it from having preciously followed some interesting things my fragmented attention had come across earlier (like how public key cryptography works and how powerful a concept it is).
This isn't meant to be a boast at all, because I'm very much aware of how my fragmented attention often takes me away from the deep focus required to complete projects. It's an interesting trade-off problem, because to focus you have to shut out 'distractions', while some 'distractions' can actually be very useful and enlightening new information. I'm sure there are many people who are doing valuable work requiring deep focus who have dismissed Bitcoin as a distraction, when, as we all agree here, Bitcoin is way too important to dismiss but it does require giving it some attention to appreciate why.
edit : should have read @elvismercury's answer to your question before replying, as they say it better than me
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I also "tend to read fairly widely and follow tangents that interest me", but I feel like there's a big difference between giving something hours of attention vs minutes.
I tend to get distracted by new things throughout the day, but when I feel like I'm functioning best, I'm usually dedicating prolonged attention to something.
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Do you think there are benefits of being fragmented rather than present? Or is it just a new obstacle that we need to adapt to?
I think for sure there are virtues to it. For a certain kind of mind (which maybe any mind can be trained for) being able to mainline 100 different ideas in the course of a couple of hours can give you truly amazing synthetic scope -- you can find connections between disparate things, develop an understanding of X as it relates to Y, and connect them to your existing scaffold. It's a very different feeling and outcome than drilling deep gets you.
It's a great mode to be in. But it's not the only mode you want to be in. At least, I certainly don't.
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