Stat­ing that “one of the more embar­rass­ing and self-indulgent chal­lenges of our time is the task of relearn­ing how to con­cen­trate”, Alain de Bot­ton’s short essay for City Jour­nal looks at our “obses­sion” with cur­rent events and how this dis­tracts us from… every­thing.

The obses­sion with cur­rent events is relent­less. We are made to feel that at any point, some­where on the globe, some­thing may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instan­ta­neously, could leave us wholly unable to com­pre­hend our­selves or our fel­lows. We are con­tin­u­ously chal­lenged to dis­cover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie the­ater vow­ing to recon­sider our lives in the light of a film’s val­ues. Yet by the fol­low­ing evening, our expe­ri­ence is well on the way to dissolution. […]

The need to diet, which we know so well in rela­tion to food, and which runs so con­trary to our nat­ural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in rela­tion to knowl­edge, peo­ple, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bod­ies, require peri­ods of fasting.

via Intel­li­gent Life