If you’ve ever used an actual camera, there are two focus modes:
Auto Focus and Manual Focus.
If you already get my analogy, you can stop reading now and go change your life. Thanks, Mr. King.
In Auto Focus Mode, the camera decides: what is the most important thing in the shot?*
Amateurs and people with cellphones or webcams or GoPros almost always use that quick & easy setting. It closes down the iris and boosts the gain, so that everything is in focus. That cinematic quality called Bokeh is abandoned. Nothing is blurry, not even the background, everything is on a single plane, and you end up with a sterile, 2D flatness like a Star Wars TV show shot in The Volume.†
In professional filmmaking, there is a person whose main job is to focus the camera. Continually, dynamically, as the camera and characters move, they twist a dial, guiding the viewer’s eye to what’s important. The more bokeh (the narrower the focus), the harder it is to do. When they’re good at their job, you don’t know it. These freaks of nature are called the 1st AC (or 1st Assistant Camera).
And of course, here’s where I’m going…
In this stupid “attention economy” it’s easy to set our brains on Auto Focus. We let advertisers and social media companies decide what’s important. Whatever the algorithm decides we should FEED into our brains, that’s what gets dumped in. Each day, a collective story emerges and we all scream about it. A day from now, a week from now, it’s gone from our memories. Disposable drama, like the Two Minutes Hate in “1984.”
For those of us who “create” the “content” for greedy server farms, our behavior is modified to please an AI. “This is what the robot wants, it will reward me by making me visible, so this is how I will live my life.” It’s insidious. Slowly, we become another version of ourselves. We do embarrassing things we’d otherwise never do, desperate to get selfies with objects or in front of locations. The moments of our lives are not for us to enjoy, but to increase engagement.
We’ve lost the ability to Manual Focus. We fired our 1st AC.
And just because “that’s the world we live in,” (a thought-terminating cliché) doesn’t mean we need to participate.
This goes beyond social media, of course.
Many of us have no deliberate plan or goals. No intentional lifestyle design. No top-down executive function. Whatever stimulating, circusy nonsense comes into our day, we flail around with it.
As Steve Vai said: “How many distractions do you allow in your life in one day?”
If we don’t manually focus, our life will be auto-focused by someone else’s intentions. And that someone else is usually someone VERY good at it: they’re called salesmen and marketers. (Wait, where did all my time, energy, and money go?)
Everyone, including me, falls into this trap to some degree. How many aspects of our lives did we engineer? Sure, sometimes there are happy accidents. But mostly not. “Going with the flow” is a rationalization for not getting your act together. Let’s not be clowns. Focusing on everything as urgent and important obviously does not work.
So, which mode do you want to be in today? And for the rest of your life?
As always: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
* On the Z-axis, specifically.
† This can also be done as an extreme, artistic choice, for effect, as in “Citizen Kane.” But it’s the exception.
A large number of people will never have focus at all, manual OR automatic. In my time as a hiring manager for a very dull line of work, I would always ask potential employees where they saw themselves in five or ten years, or what it was that they really WANTED, and so many of them had no idea. I found it bewildering how many people I met who didn’t even have an answer for “what if you never had to worry about money? What would you do with yourself THEN?” People are so focused on survival alone, these days, that they can’t even dedicate a few quadrants of grey matter to imagine a dream job, a perfect career, or something they want for themself any further than “I want a ‘good job’ so I can afford a house.” It’s as if dreaming for ideals has become a luxury that few can afford, so instead, humans bounce from distraction to distraction, unaware of the realities surrounding them or even that there is a possible path to awareness at all.
“Everybody’s working for the weekend.” Everybody is living vicariously through sports-ball actors and team politics, never bothering to touch the collars that focus the lenses of their own cinematic viewpoints. They don’t even notice that the screen is blurry and the plot makes no sense.
I guess it makes me more grateful to be able to even have the thought processes, myself. At least I’m aware enough to HAVE dreams to focus on.
I also feel lucky for whatever small amount of understanding I have.