Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

Paul Virilio wrote, ‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.’

In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others, and those who proudly call themselves ‘indistractable’.

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.

Imagine the incredible power of following through on your intentions.

You have to give it to the ancient Greeks for their allegories. It’s hard to portray a better representation of the human condition. We are constantly reaching for something:

All behaviours, both traction and distraction, are prompted by triggers, whether internal or external.

our world has always been full of things designed to distract us.

Tantalus’ curse was his blindness to the fact he didn’t need those things in the first place. That’s the real moral of the story. Tantalus’ curse is also our curse. We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t. We don’t need to check our email right this second; we don’t need to give in to some other distraction, no matter how much we feel we must.

Esto, una y mil veces. Tántalo ya está muerto, no necesita comer ni beber, no puede morir de hambre y sed, ahí está el castigo, en padecer sin morir. No se da cuenta de que la forma de ganar el juego es no jugar.

Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do. Indistractable people are as honest with themselves as they are with others.

Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting. Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, put it best: ‘By pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.’4 Simply put, the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behaviour, while everything else is a proximate cause.

Lo que está diciendo es parecido a lo que dice Hayes. El refuerzo negativo es más potente que el castigo y que el positivo .

Understand the root cause of distraction. Distraction is about more than your devices.

All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort.

As the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson put it, ‘My life is one long escape from myself.’

Qué terrible es ver lo de la evitación experiencial por todas partes.