Adolescent Distractive Harmony Disorder

There's a prevailing stereotype about teens like myself. Well, there's actually a lot of prevailing stereotypes about us, but most of them aren't necessary relevant to this discussion. Or appropriate for certain audiences (after all, as often as I use profanity on this blog, I still have a lot of politically correct viewers who would take offense at any further crudeness. Let me rephrase that: my mother is the self-appointed censor of this blog).

Anyway, prevailing stereotypes. There's one in particular that our elders reserve for us teens, which certainly has foundation:

We get distracted too damn much.

Oh, the youth of today. They just don't have an attention span. They keep shifting between 140 character "tweeters" and these strange 7 second videos. Don't count on them to start their homework anytime soon, 'cause they're just gonna spend all day texting each other about Justin Bieber and Jay-Z and their new shoes and their Playstation games.

Damn, adults sure do think we're stupid. We just can't do anything right 'cause we're too busy trying to absorb ourselves in other parts of the world. Well, to a certain extent... they're right.

Now, I'm not trying to dismiss the rest of my peers as lazy. I'll do that some other time. (Procrastination: another problem that plagues youth). What I am going to say is that the need for distractions is a big part of the adolescent's life, and there is a sort of balance we achieve with it.

I'll admit that there are a lot of problems that arise from these distractions. Distractions cause us to miss a lot of beautiful things in the world that we regret missing later on in life. I often regret that when I went to Europe, I spent too much time scouting out wi-fi locations and not enough time observing the fact that I was in freaking Europe. I suppose that a lot of these impulses of distraction are things that we can hardly help and are really more just bad habits (I mean, how many of you have to have at least four tabs open on Google Chrome in order to properly function?).

But I have come to believe that distractions can bring their benefits just as well. We, adolescents and every other person in the world, have to process a lot of information all at once, and we can't always handle it. The news, the variety of subjects in school, the web of relationships we spin around ourselves. Trying to handle it day to day is a herculean feat, and we need to provide ourselves with moments to breathe as we roll our stone up the hill.

Think about how we try to escape reality and regroup ourselves. I ask my peers: how many times have you gotten so frustrated with High School that you glanced at a possible college's website (for the 547th time) to imagine the future? How many times have you felt hurt by someone and started clinging to people on the opposite end of the spectrum? How many times have you gotten overstimulated at a big gathering of peers and forced yourself to try and find something else to focus on until you could leave?

I do that stuff day to day.

The adolescent's distraction, while it comes with baggage and shortens our ability to focus on the issues at hand, is an evolutionary skill that carries us into the next day. We can escape reality, possibly even reaching our "mountaintop" (I have another post all about that crap). It's really an amazing thing, and we should learn to value the times where we can pause time and focus less intensively on much smaller things. It allows us to go back into our own minds and organize our thoughts.

Before I go, I must emphasize that our distractions should be minimal and we shouldn't allow them to control us. We must learn to find time to see our lives as a whole when the present proves too much of a rush.

I a video where a UNC grad filmed one second of every day of her senior year for one big video. I'll be shamelessly ripping that idea off for the year to come, and I'll probably just continue it until I get tired of it. But I believe that it can be both a new distraction to focus on and a way to truly see that dull narrative of life as a whole.

I ask all of my peers reading this to ask themselves how they manage to distract themselves from the fast-moving world. What pushes you from the pressures of your life into the miniature reality of your distractions? More importantly, where does the line blur between seeing life as a whole and seeing only this miniature reality?

We'll just have to wait and see. I've got some really freaking short clips to film.

Mornin' Hays, signing off.