Johann Georg Wille: The Distracted Observer (1766)

"What's my 5% solution? What's yours?"

Each era sets a tone, a rhythm for living in that time. Obama brought hope for a liberal democracy wounded by two terms of pseudo-conservative idiocy, for instance, and Biden’s time reinstituted a sense of decency, which, predictably, set the corrupt class absolutely crazy. This brings us to our current era, where our leader, above all else, specializes in distracting himself. I doubt that he’s completed as many thoughts as he’s completed sentences, by which I mean there’s absolutely no evidence that he’s ever successfully completed either. Predictably, his milieu proves to be communicable. It probably isn’t an accident that we’re suddenly suffering from severe bouts of distraction disorders. Sure, we started seriously distracting ourselves during the COVID years—remember who the incumbent was then?—but it took some practice and serious repetition before it turned into a discernible problem, just in time for old, reliable Mr. Distraction to take office again.

This theme provides personal insight into the self-esteem of our oh-so-fearful leader. What seems like a personal problem might well be more resonance than reflection of personal shortcomings for us. First, we have had some of our most brilliant minds focusing on creating and amplifying the problem. The Tech Bros have been promoting the distraction business for fun and world domination. They’ve employed the best and brightest Stanford grads to create this so-called solution. Our distraction is their solution, and a wildly successful one so far. They started out playing us like derelict pianos until they’d enabled us to play ourselves. The technology was specifically designed to produce this kind of distraction, the sort that requires little intervention from without. We’re experiencing 2nd Order Distraction now, where we’re becoming fully capable of distracting ourselves from the distractions provided. We’re regulating ourselves with our own obsessions now.

My relatively tiny brain diagnoses the root problem and concludes that a solution might lie in distracting myself from the distractions. If distraction worked in opposition to my best interests, how might I harness this practice into something that might prove more therapeutic? What might an anti-distraction look like and where might it originate? I stumbled across an app yesterday that purported to provide just such a treatment. Invented by two renegade tech bros, it was supposed to employ the same technology that created the distractions to attenuate their effect. Unfortunately, their technology wanted some sort of Pastword to download, and after exhausting every possible combination of PastWord I’d ever used and failing, I abandoned my innocent attempt to sic the technology back onto itself.

Back to my broader point. I have been given a great gift, one that enables me to experience what it feels like inside a world-class distractor. Our fearful leader feels this revulsion inside that I’m suddenly feeling. He’s unable to control his horrible feelings. He has never been able to control them. What we might remember as positive self-esteem, even peaking self-esteem sometimes, he’s never once experienced, for his default-installed defense against this cruel world was designed to distract himself from its effects. This superpower never once protected him from the usual slings and arrows, but left him extremely vulnerable. He became cynical at an early age, a criminal uninterested in obeying laws, a pedophile. He was hardly a renegade, but a reprobate instead. He surely felt rotten to what passed for his core, an experience that we’re just now starting to share with our rightfully maligned theme setter. We malign ourselves now.

I take some respite in acknowledging that I’m resonating and certainly not the sole author of my suddenly sorry condition. I won’t feign contrition when I refuse to accept that I’m the sole or even the immediate cause of this situation. This was a collaboration and one stacked against my better interests from the outset. I entered as an innocent and will leave, if, indeed, I ever manage to leave, much more experienced. I might even manage to stumble upon a few effective 2nd Order Distractions to counter the infection.

I want to leave this story on that note. A friend posted a report about the effectiveness of mask mandates in Britain during COVID. It concluded that wearing masks was about 5% effective in disrupting COVID-19’s spread, and that this sure seems like a modest result, perhaps even a failure. Except the way epidemics spread relies upon 100% unchecked spread, and even a 5% disruption, their study concluded, resulted in saving about half the number lost to that epidemic. That 5% produced a clearly significant result.

I take perhaps premature solace in acknowledging that even distraction, which seems to have been spreading essentially unchecked through the population and even amplified by the presence of a distractor-in-chief in office, might be meaningfully countered with much less than total abstinence, which seems impossible given the current conditions. The White House will continue spewing fresh distractions at about the rate the average Gatling gun uses ammunition, but I might meaningfully deflect enough of the noise to make a significant dent in my negative experience, even if I currently lack the discipline for total abstinence. I consider this to be ground-breaking news. We have inherited the world we’ve inherited. We might retain agency to take even this mess on our own terms. What’s my 5% solution? What’s yours?

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz