Mind Wandering: The Rise of an Anti-Mindfulness Movement
21st December 2015
In a world where attention is a currency, it makes sense to spend it wisely. The first people to spend a lot of time on the internet saw this very clearly. In Howard Rheingold’s 1993 book Virtual Communities, one of the earliest works to chronicle the reality of life online, he laid out two rules for the coming age: “Rule Number One is to pay attention. Rule Number Two might be: attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”
Unfortunately, as a growing body of scientific work is showing, paying attention to where we pay attention is not something we are very good at. You know how it goes: one moment you’re reading or driving, the next you’re off in a daze, thinking about what you should have for lunch, or running through to-do lists in your head. Because we only notice we have drifted off when we awake with a start some time later, it is easy to write these lapses off as trivial. In fact, this kind of mind-wandering is how we spend a large proportion of our lives.