Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered. This means that once the attention economy has rendered you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to assume that this is just what life these days inevitably feels like. In T. S. Eliot’s words, we are ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’.10