The Wit’s Guide to Distraction

Or, get an Isolator already

Feb 20, 2025

The complaints about distraction have escalated to the point that you can’t read one without being distracted by the next. So ignore them all and focus instead on vintage whines about the same subject. Why, here’s Alain de Botton in 2010: “To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.” And this was six months before the launch of Instagram!

“The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.”
― Saul Bellow

And of course you can go back much further, to Nikolai Tesla complaining about the radio. “I know I’m its father, but I don’t like it,” he told the New York Herald Tribune whilst brandishing a paternity test in 1932. “The radio is a distraction and keeps you from concentrating. There are too many distractions in this life for quality of thought; and it’s quality of thought, not quantity, that counts.”

“I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.”
― Delmore Schwartz

But why stop there? Back in 420, medieval monks had it up to their tonsures with the pre-modern world’s distractions! There were windows to look out, next meals to consider, and various beers and cheeses to invent. “They complained about being overloaded with information, and about how, even once you finally settled on something to read, it was easy to get bored and turn to something else,” writes historian Jaime Kreiner.

“Distracted from distraction by distraction.”
― T.S. Eliot

Yes, it is true that phones beep a lot these days. But I’m partial to Daniel Immerwahr’s recent conclusion in The New Yorker: “When someone calls for audiences to be more patient, I instinctively think, Alternatively, you could be less boring.” Which is a corollary to my favourite line from Elisa Gabbert’s 2020 poem New Theories on Boredom: “Did you know that you can trick people into being more interesting by being more interesting yourself?”

“The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.”
― Ezra Pound

Some distractions are good! Maybe most! When you’re desperately trying to jam more numbers into a spreadsheet — more numbers! Ever more numbers! We’re in the middle of a productivity crisis! —and a butterfly floats by, is it so wrong to pause for a moment to observe the winged creature? As Ferris Bueller reminds us, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Students of flow, that optimal state of losing yourself in your work, know that you don’t get distracted in a flow state. Your goal, then, should be to find work that’s more interesting than a butterfly.

“To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas.”
— Roland Barthes

And besides, the cure for distraction was already invented and is pictured here. The Isolator, a helmet to cure distractions, was patented by Hugo Gernsback in 1925. Of particular note is the oxygen tank, which “increases the respiration and livens the subject considerably.” Gernsback held 80 patents and helped invent the genre of science fiction, so he was certainly productive. Therefore, anyone who complains about being distracted without investing in an Isolator doesn’t really mean it.

How much snow did we get in the last week? Three Riposte Cards’ worth! And not coincidentally, that’s roughly how many of each month’s elegantly commissioned postcards I just sent to each of my paying subscribers in an A4 envelope. (I send ’em in pairs — six total — every two months to save on postage, and if you haven’t got January and February, hit reply and let me know!) Subscribe now to get the next batch!

“Reeling and writhing, of course, to begin with,’ the Mock-Turtle replied; ‘and then the four branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
— Lewis Carroll

Georges Simenon, the prolific Belgian crime novelist, broke it off with Josephine Baker because their romance was a distraction from his work; he was only able to write 12 novels in the year they were seeing each other. That means his lifetime output of 400 books could have been, what, 410?

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Issue No. 294 of Get Wit Quick stayed on target to this point, so I think we’ll make it all the way. When distraction is weaponized, it becomes misdirection. And if it’s really bad, perhaps we call it disdirection? Shiny things distract us because they have value! Just ask this newsletter’s mascot, an intelligent bird who collects said things? His name is Magnus, via the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, and aren’t magicians the the best and worst at misdirection, constantly asking us to look at meaningless playing cards and filling the air with fascinating commentary? Damn them! The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. My book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, and if you can focus on the ❤️ below long enough to tap it, I’ll happily be distracted by a notification that you did so.