Concluding Some Thoughts About Distraction

[If you've followed along with the Distraction posts up to this point, congratulations! The conclusion is here. And thanks for reading!]

Previously, I dichotomized distraction into two subcategories: idle distraction and distraction as transposing of self. Now, I want to draw back out to that overarching super-umbrella called distraction—in all its diverse forms. What is the point of distraction? I’m sure there are a multitude of completely plausible answers to this question. Perhaps some would say that it is an innocuous and necessary part of life, that all human beings at pretty much all times in history have engaged in some form of distraction. Maybe it purely comes down to the neuroscience of it all: our brains are just wired for distraction. Some might argue that it is impossible to live life completely without distractions. And all of these answers might be true. But bouncing around in my (all too often distracted) little brain is the notion that distraction has factored into the timeless course of evolution as a survival mechanism. A survival mechanism that evolved primarily in response to the development of consciousness.

Somewhere along the lines of our evolution into homo sapiens, our brains developed the capacity for self-awareness. Not being an evolutionary biologist or psychologist myself, I am only left to speculate when and how this came to be. But I think that it is pretty safe to say that if you trace our evolution back far enough that you will witness a form of primate that did not possess what we would today call consciousness. Now obviously, as with all evolution, the change did not occur overnight. The primordial primate did not go to sleep one night unaware of itself in any meaningful way and wake up the next morning with a fully developed concept of self. More than likely, the development of consciousness evolved over many, many years, and is most likely still evolving today. Again, as with all evolution, the catalyst to develop this change came about in response to environmental situations. So it can be safely assumed that we as a species developed consciousness as some sort of survival mechanism. As most of us would agree (I assume), consciousness brings all sorts of positives. It is a necessary element that allows for us as humans to achieve all of those characteristics that set us apart from the rest of the natural world, specifically the capacity for advanced rational thought. It allows for us to have a self-concept and to understand ourselves and how it (the self) relates to other selves. It allows for self-awareness, abstract thought, introspection, perception, reflection, individuality, and a lot more. 

I have no idea whether the development of consciousness is merely one of the many parts of our evolving ability for rational thought, or whether consciousness was a link in the chain that led to the further development of rational thinking, or maybe it’s both: a kind of symbiotic process.  Nonetheless, it seems that the continual evolution of both consciousness and rational thought reached a point where consciousness evolved past the point of utility. This theory (if you can call it that), namely that consciousness was some sort of “mistake” in evolution, has its fair share of supporters—perhaps most recently/famously the pessimist/anti-natalist detective in the first season of True Detective by the name of Rust Cohle. For those of  you who watched season one of TD, you’ll be familiar with this quote; for those of you who didn’t, just imagine sexy/emaciated Matthew Mcconaughey delivering the lines in aloof, southern fashion:

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

I don’t know if I necessarily buy the notion of consciousness as an illusion. And I’m not sure if I would go ahead and label the whole of consciousness as a “mistake” as some have called it. But I do think that there is some plausibility to the idea that consciousness evolved past a point where it was useful to our survival as a species, and actually toward a place that is threatening to our survival as a species. When you combine the capacity for continually advancing forms of cognition with likewise continually evolving consciousness, it is literally only a matter of time until we human beings figure out that we are extremely mortal, fragile, and fickle creatures that exist for an infinitesimally short amount of time on an earth where many billions of humans just like us have already lived and perished, in a solar system that is a mote in a galaxy that is a speck in the universe. Truthfully, we are pretty insignificant in the scope of eternal time and space. The awareness of ourselves, combined with the awareness of that tiny place our self has in the huge world--and to an infinitely larger degree the timeless universe--is a prime recipe for an existential crisis.
 
I assume that existential crises are not necessarily accommodating to the necessity of survival. What’s the point of things like reproduction? Or why struggle so hard to survive in a callous, cold, chaotic, uncaring universe? Consciousness + rational thought + the reality of our existential precariousness = a poisonous concoction that is antithetical to survival.
 
Don’t worry though. I haven’t hopped on the Cohle-train of organized self-extinction. Rather than signing up for cooperative self-annihilation as an answer to the “problem” of consciousness, I think that evolution already took care of it and is taking care of it.
 
Where consciousness gives way to existential crisis and panic, distraction is introduced as the mollifying antidote to the poisonous concoction just mentioned. Distraction is basically the reaction or countermeasure to an evolution of consciousness that started to become adversarial to survival. The more we distract ourselves--the more we lose ourselves in distraction--the less conscious we become. The more distracted we are, the more we are able to fulfill our special mandate: to continue surviving. We watch TV, we eat, we Tweet, we poop, we game, we propagate. No problems. Perhaps, some point in the future distraction will outpace its usefulness to our survival and a resulting counter swing with consciousness will again ensue. But for now, we live in an age of distraction.