Stay Distracted
The distraction economy, e.g. that li'l supercomputer in your pocket, keeps you stuck
You might be happy, but you might be miserable. Who’s to say? You don’t have time to check in with yourself the way a normal human being would have had even ten years ago. You are constantly bombarded by notifications, bad news, clickbait, trolls, quick little jaunts onto our preferred social media platform that turn into to hours-long rabbitholes. Everyone’s fking opinion on everything. I mean, shut up already.
But of course it’s not up to them to shut up. It’s up to us - you and me - to shut them out. A common internet refrain, ‘You know you could just not read / watch / listen to / comment on something you hate’ is spot on, and I’ll add: You know you could just not do any of those things to something you love, or like, or are sort of indifferent to but you need something to occupy your brain during the thirteen seconds when you’re taking a pee break.
And yes, this thing you’re reading right now is my opinion and it’s on the internet and thus, technically, I am one of them so I wholeheartedly endorse you shutting me out. But finish reading it first…
Maybe this flew into your inbox along with a thousand other things today, or maybe you unconsciously navigated to yourlifeswork.substack.com while craving some mid-micturation literature, and that’s fine, but seriously, as much as it pains me to push away any fraction of my readership, if you are not truly and of your own volition interested in reading this: STOP.
Seriously, just stop, and put your phone down, or close your laptop, and go the F outside or something.
Our brains are absolutely being carpet-bombed by content, content … CONTENT. This is not a new phenomenon, relatively speaking - depending on the order of magnitude of bombardment considered, one might argue it’s been going on for as long as 50 or as short as 10 years, but until fairly recently, most of us did seem to at least have some respite from content pummeling built into our average day.
Now it feels like we are screens, screeds, pings, and dings from the moment we awaken til bedtime, and beyond.
So what’s all this to me, you know, since I’m ostensibly a career coach?
I’d argue the constant distractions we face pose an existential threat to my career.
So, yeah, it’s kinda a big deal.
Let me explain.
My whole thing, as a career coach, well, it’s not really just helping people rebrand themselves and gussy up their resumes and bring their LinkedIn profiles into the 21st century - though that is some of it, it’s not the most interesting part to me, and plenty of other coaches and consultants can help you with all that, and frankly it’s not even close to the most challenging and vexing problem my average client faces.
The big kahuna problem my average client faces comes way before the resume / linkedIn / cover letter (gag!) shuffle. Public Enemy Client Problem Number 1 is not ‘How do I pitch myself to new potential employers?’, it’s ‘What the actual FK do I want to do with the rest of my career (/ life)?’
Helping people answer this question and dramatically change their lives for the better is my bread and butter. This is my ‘Zone of Genius’, as they say. It’s by far the most fulfilling part of my job and, with characteristic humility, I gently offer to you, Dear Reader, that I’m really, really, really, exceedingly good at it.
Here’s the problem, for me, the Career Coach.
If everyone’s so distracted, so brain-rotted, so drip-fed, so absolutely scrambled by the Distract-o-Thon of their various electronic accoutrements and gazillion news feeds and Ye Olde L’il Uselesse Videoe Clipse (note: again, I make some of these L’il clips myself, but mine are worth watching, please clap, k byeeee).. Ahem, if everyone is so friggin’ distracted and numbed all the time, when the F are they going to actually ask themselves a big, thorny question like ‘Is this it?’ or ‘What the heck do I want to be when I grow up, even though I am, (say), 45?’
So yeah: big deal.
Because this is true for some of you readers, and if you (will allow yourself to) know, you know:
Your. Job. Sucks.
Your. Career. Sucks. And you hate it.
But you don’t let yourself ever really feel that, you don’t let yourself really own and experience the pain of your shitty work life, and sit with it, i.e.: ‘LET THAT SINK IN’, because you’ve got little Clicky Longstocking in your pocket and when you make it go Bleep Bloop, brain go ZZZ . (Also, some of you are distracting yourself from the pain in the old-fashioned, ‘analog’ way, aka drinking yourselves to death, but that’s like, a different article and stuff.)
And here’s the thing about career coaching. I can be the greatest coach in the world, and I can even - one day, we hope, we all hope - become a great marketer of my coaching services. But what I cannot do is convince anyone that they need to make a change, if they don’t already believe it themselves on some level.
Yes, I can help people who sense that something’s off - who experience a certain ennui (as sharply contrasted with a joie de vivre and, somewhat less so with a je ne sais quoi), people who are feeling some kind of way… I can help them (you?) dig deep and unpack what lies beneath that, break through inherited narratives about what they should or shouldn’t do and who they can or can’t be. In short, I can help people who know something’s wrong figure out what the F it is and what the F they should do about it.
But I can’t do anything for people who simply don’t realize something’s wrong, because their poor brains are so addled by the placating dopamine assault of modern electronic living, they aren’t even really connected with themselves any more.
I can help you find and do better work and love your life more, but only if you first recognize that you want to make a change. And that takes getting your head out of your ass phone, and looking around yourself, and zooming out to look at yourself, and making the time and headspace to actually ask the hard questions like:
Jeez, am I really going to spend the rest of my working days banging out TPS reports?
Is this the example I want to set for my kids, phoning it in for 40 years in the hopes of cramming all my joy into my Golden Years?
What’s this Life Forrrrrrr, oorrr er orrr?
So yeah, as The Kids might say but might not any longer, already: Touch Grass.
Get out of your phone, get out of your routine, shake yourself loose and actually let yourself FEEL how the current state of your work life makes you feel. THINK about what you want to be doing for work. Use your imagination - remember that dusty old thing? - to DREAM about how your day-to-day could be.
Then, quick!, before you snap back into your screen zombie stupor, give me a call.