The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

If Glenberg is right about memory and environmental suppression, it would seem this activity of narrative self-articulation gets under way, developmentally, with the capacity to ignore things. Further, because this self-articulation is something we are never finished with, an ability to ignore things would seem to remain important to the lifelong task of carving out an...

because it is convinced that rational agency is an illusion.

Behavioral economics is impressed with psychological findings that suggest that the reasons for our actions are generally opaque to us, not objects of rational scrutiny. Whatever reason-giving we engage in tends to be a post hoc story that we tell ourselves,

The field of neuroethics pushes this line of argument further: free will is an illusion.

But regrettably, claims the neuroethicist, it also gives rise to metaphysical superstitions about the existence of mind.14

We can even imagine an especially consistent neuroethicist surveying the airport scene I have described and viewing it with a certain satisfaction: maybe an environment that is sufficiently stimulating will divert us from indulging in reason-giving, that quaint activity by which man clings to the idea that he is somehow special.

There is another way to think about these things. What if the coherence of a life is in some significant way a function of culture?

One element of our predicament is that we engage less than we once did in everyday activities that structure our attention. Rituals do this, for example.

They establish narrow and highly structured patterns of attention—what I shall be calling ecologies of attention—that can give coherence to our mental lives, however briefly.

As a result, choice is simplified and momentum builds. Action becomes unimpeded.

“Encountering Things.” There I suggest that it is indeed things that can serve as a kind of authority for us, by way of structuring our attention. The design of things—for example, cars and children’s toys—conditions the kind of involvement we have in our own activity. Design establishes an ecology of attention that can be more or less well adapted to the requirements of skillful, unimpeded action.

Understood literally, autonomy means giving a law to oneself.

In a culture predicated on this opposition (autonomy good, heteronomy bad), it is difficult to think clearly about attention—the faculty that joins us to the world—because everything located beyond your head is regarded as a potential source of heteronomy, and therefore a threat to the self.

To do justice to the phenomenon of attention, we will have to wrestle with that notion of freedom.

The paradox is that the ideal of autonomy seems to work against the development and flourishing of any rich ecology of attention—the sort in which minds may become powerful and achieve genuine independence.

In the chapters that follow we will consider the ways our environment constitutes the self, rather than compromises it.

Attention is at the core of this constitutive or formative process. When we become competent in some particular field of practice, our perc...

we become attuned to pertinent features of a situation that would be inv...

Through the exercise of a skill, the self that acts in the world take...

To emphasize this is to put oneself at odds with some pervasive cultural reflexes. Any quick perusal of the self-help section of a bookstore teaches that the central character in our contemporary drama is a being who must choose what he is to be, and bring about his transformation through an effort of the will.

The latter self-understanding is an invitation to narcissism, to be sure. But it also tends to make us more easily manipulated. As atomized individuals called to create meaning for ourselves, we find ourselves the recipients of all manner of solicitude and guidance.

The image of human excellence I would like to offer as a counterweight to freedom thus understood is that of a powerful, independent mind working at full song. Such independence is won through disciplined attention, in the kind of action that joins us to the world. And—this is important—it is precisely those constraining circumstances that provide the discipline.

will be emphasizing three elements of this situatedness: our embodiment, our deeply social nature, and the fact that we live in a particular historical moment. These correspond to the three major divisions of the book: “Encountering Things,” “Other People,” and “Inheritance.”

It would be conventional at this point to say that what emerges in the argument is a concept of true freedom as opposed to false freedom. What I want to do instead is simply drop “freedom” as a term of approbation. The word is strained by being made to do too much cultural work; it has become a linguistic reflex that affirms our image of ourselves as autonomous. In doing so, it obscures the sources of our current predicament of attention—by reenacting the central dogma that gave rise to it.

For the originators of modern thought, this was to be accomplished by treating objects as projections of the mind; we make contact with them only through our representations of them.

Autonomy talk stems from Enlightenment epistemology and moral theory, which did important polemical work in their day against various forms of coercion. Times have changed. The philosophical project of this book is to reclaim the real, as against representations. That is why the central term of approbation in these pages is not “freedom” but “agency.”

For it is when we are engaged in a skilled practice that the world shows up for us as having a reality of its own, independent of the self. Reciprocally, the self comes into view as being in a situation that is not of its own making.

The Latin root of our English word “attention” is tenere, which means to ...

External objects provide an attachment point for the mind; they pull...

It is in the encounter between the self and the brute alien otherness of the real that beautiful things become possible: the puck-handling fi...

When a carpenter wants to cut a half-dozen boards to the same length, he is unlikely to measure each one, mark it, and then carefully guide his saw along the line he has made on each board. Rather, he will make a jig. A jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without his having to think about it.

A jig reduces the degrees of freedom that are afforded by the environment. It stabilizes a process, and in doing so lightens the burden of care—on both memory and fine muscular control. The concept of a jig can be extended beyond its original context of manual fabrication. As David Kirsh points out in his classic and indispensable article “The Intelligent Use of Space,” jigging is something that expert practitioners do generally, if we allow that it is possible to jig one’s environment “informationally.”

A bartender gets an order from a waitress: a vodka and soda, a glass of house red, a martini up, and a mojito. What does he do? He lays out the four different kinds of glass that the drinks require in a row, so he doesn’t have to remember them.

Consider a short-order cook on the breakfast shift. As he finishes his coffee, the first order of the morning comes in: a sausage, onion, and mushroom omelet with wheat toast. The cook lays out the already chopped sausage next to the pan, the onions next to the sausage, then the bread, and finally the mushrooms, farthest from the pan. He now has the ingredients in a spatial order that corresponds to the temporal order in which he will require them: once it gets hot, the sausage will provide the grease in which the onions will cook, and the onions take longer to fry than the mushrooms do. He places the bread between the onions and the mushrooms as a reminder to himself to start toasting the bread at such a time that the toast will be ready just as he is sliding the omelet out of the pan. The pace of what comes next is set by the level of heat under the pan, which he generally leaves at the same level throughout the shift—it corresponds to an internal clock he has developed through long practice.

Kirsh finds that experts “constantly re-arrange items to make it easy to 1. track the task; 2. figure out, remember, or notice the properties signaling what to do next; 3. predict the effects of actions.”

This frees them from the kind of halting deliberation that you can see at a glance in the movements of a beginner who is relying on conscious analytical processes.

A physical jig reduces the physical degrees of freedom a person must contend with.

High-level performance is then to some degree a matter of being well situated, let us say. When we watch a cook who is hitting his flow, we see someone inhabiting the kitchen—a space for action that has in some sense become an extension of himself.

As orders pile up and overlap, the available work space in the kitchen cannot remain devoted to separate orders, with ingredients arranged to match a definite temporal sequence. It becomes messy-looking to a casual observer, and necessarily improvisational because the cook is dealing with competing structures of sequence: the sequence of orders received; the sequence that might be more efficient by grouping orders requiring the same task, or tasks done in close proximity to each other;

The point of an assembly line is to replace skilled work with routinized work that can be done by unskilled labor. Early in the twentieth century this gave rise to the saying “Cheap men need expensive jigs; expensive men need only the tools in their toolbox.”

A humming kitchen of the sort I have described may be regarded as an ecology of attention in which the external demand of feeding people in a timely manner provides a loose structure within which the kitchen staff themselves establish an internal order of smooth, adaptive action. In the course of doing this they hit upon various jigs for keeping their attention properly directed.

This is consistent with a shift currently taking place at the frontiers of cognitive science, in the (still somewhat dissident) movement toward a picture of human beings as having “extended” or “embedded” cognition.

Andy Clark, one of the leading figures in the extended-mind literature, writes that “advanced cognition depends crucially on ...

This “rational optimizer” view has come in for thorough revision with the advent of the more psychologically informed school of “behavioral economics.” There is a large literature that shows that, for example, we consistently underestimate how long it will take us to get things done, no matter how many times we have been surprised by this same fact in the past (the so-called planning fallacy). We give undue weight to the most recent events when trying to grasp a larger pattern and predict the future. In general, we are terrible at estimating probabilities. We are not so much rational optimizers as creatures who rely on biases and crude heuristics for making important decisions.

So, for example, if one wants to increase the savings rate, it makes a great deal of difference whether employers set the default so that employees have to opt in to a 401(k) plan if they want it, or instead they have to opt out if they don’t. Participation is much higher under opt-out.

We might call this an administrative jig. But note that this kind of administering of human beings, which certainly has its place in a modern state, is quite different from the jig as it appears in skilled practices. The difference is that skilled practitioners themselves keep their actions on track by “partially jigging or informationally structuring the environment as they go along,”

it is true in general that a cook begins his day in an environment that has already been given a long-term structure by someone else, equipped with tools and facilities laid out in some arrangement.

Thus, other people tacitly hover in the background of the cook’s activity and give shape to it.

To accumulate wealth was important not as a means to indulgence, but as a sign that one’s life was on track. God had so arranged things that the status of one’s soul was visible in one’s portfolio; wealth was proof of election.

But wait. Is the Protestant’s virtue “situational”? If we plucked him out of eighteenth-century New England and set him down in Tahiti, would we discover a different man?