Ghosts in The Attic

It’s the end of another day in my household, one that seems to play out all too familiarly. I start my morning with a semblance of a routine that I have cobbled together; a leftover from Europe I suppose. I wash my face, make myself a thermos of tea (this week I am stuck on earl grey, taken with rock sugar, milk and no hotter than tepid). I start the process of assembling the day’s goals. Maybe I’ll go out into the sun for a bit, I’m dreadfully pale again. Today’s the day that I take all of the unwanted items to Goodwill. Oh I have been meaning to contact a bankruptcy lawyer; a welcome home gift from having the financial competency of an addict. I could do some gigwork and hustle up some money today. Ope, I really need to change my plant’s dirt, it’s got to need some nutrients by now. Oh, and of course all of the homework I need to do.

Coming back from Europe I was riding a high. Maybe I really am capable of being a routined, scheduled, and productive adult. I beamed with pride at the tasks I accomplished, the sights I saw, the ground I covered, and even the fact that I had time to do side work and make some extra money. I was astounded at how productive a day could be, and that when you got up early, there was an incredible feeling of accomplishment that came with that. Surely, I could find the time to schedule my days accordingly and be the productive little busy bee that I just knew I was capable of. And thanks to the empty husk of a company formerly known as Chico’s firing me before my trip, I was sure I could make the most of a day and check things off my to-do list with a fury that only the most organized of household matriarchs could understand.

I think reality finally hit me about a week ago, that whatever it is that productive people possess, I don’t. When faced with the urgency of a deadline, I couldn’t bear to get more than five minutes of work done without returning to my phone to doomscroll. I read and reread the same pages over and over again after I realize that I have been daydreaming about whether I can properly kiss my husband if I get my lip pierced. I manage to do things around the house, but in such a disjointed way that a person with amnesia would; jumping from task to task, each half done with pieces misplaced. The dread and more forebodingly, the self loathing is quickly setting in. Why can’t I just put that stupid fucking phone down? Why do I need to stop what I am doing to shop for hundreds of dollars of makeup, 90% of which I will never wear.

Truth be told, I understand that there is a twofold problem here. One, I am cripplingly ADHD or possibly AUDHD, and the other my friends ( I am calling you that because low key, I can’t remember to have those in real life either) I am a victim of the death of boredom. Sometime around 2005 the internet became more than a novelty and more of a way of life. Us millennials thought we had it so great torrenting a shit ton of music, playing dope computer games and talking to our friends on AIM. But the pivotal change happened when the internet left the desk and found its way into our pockets. It was at that point we were doomed to a life of ever decreasing levels of attention at the cost of trying to cure boredom. I can remember so many nights in my room reading page after page of a book, maybe hitting 75+ before deciding to drift off to sleep. I can barely make it past 5 without being on the struggle bus; my mind like a BB in a barrel banging around from obscure idea to intrusive thought.

I want to delete Facebook so bad, and yet there is this part of me that really enjoys the group pages of crafts, plants, dream rooms, and ren faire ideas that keep me coming back for more. It’s a collection of my life, for better or worse, of the past 14 years; the good, bad, and the ugly. Deleting it feels like throwing away a scrapbook. I suppose they want you to feel like that, the guilt keeps us coming back and feeds the algorithm a bit more. Social media has been a great tool, but the damage that it has done to our ability to concentrate and to sometimes just be content in being bored, has irreparably marred a generation’s productivity and future.

We have lost the ability to be bored, and to be content with finding curiosity and contentment in the mundane. All these screens break down our ability to focus our energy on one task because we have conditioned our attention span to be much like our feeds; bursts of thought, followed by wave after wave of bombardment in the brain. At the end of the day, none of it really meaningful or memorable. It’s like busywork at the office, supposedly you’re doing something, but no one, not even you knows what it is. The constant interruption of the connected world has fed us the illusion that we can get MORE done, that we are SAVING time. Time for what? Sitting around watching 30 second reels only to skip past the longer ones because our attention span is starting to waver? What more have we done other than multitask with each task being given less thought and attention the one before. I think what’s worse is we see the symptoms of the disease. Oftentimes at the end of the day we are so overstimulated from a life of overstimulation, that we go into task paralysis and blink at our phones until sleep takes us.

I for one am fed up with this life. The technology addict in me tells me that if I put my phone away then no one can contact me; newsflash, no one contacts me anyway. What am I missing out on? So as I set out to try yet another self help remedy I hope that I will find motivation to stand firm in my convictions, and if you’re reading this far I encourage you to do the same, and maybe send me a word of encouragement along the way.