Distraction is Killing Our Creativity
What we lose when we don’t give our minds opportunities to play
When we were little, my sister and I used to play a game called “the floor is lava.” My mom would yell at us as we jumped around on our sofas and onto the dining room table, trying to get across the room without touching the ground. We took ordinary objects around us and added our own layer of imagination to repurpose them.
There are numerous studies that show decreased creative thinking in today’s children from time spent indoors tied to their phones and tablets — playing Angry Birds, chatting, and surfing Facebook. The boundaries and limits of their imagination are set by the boundaries of their apps; there is no flexibility for them to edit and reappropriate as their own. Think back to how you played Monopoly as a kid, and how you bent the rules, or negotiated handshake deals with your playmates.
Through their interactions with technology, children are told over and over again, “The rules are set from the outside. You can’t change them.”
In a popular article by Peter Gray on “the play deficit,” he stresses the importance of free play between children without adult guidance or supervision. “When left to their own devices, children “negotiate both their physical and social environments through play, [and] gain a sense of mastery over their world.” When we give our children games that can’t be overridden, they lose the ability to add their own rules on top of the objects they interact with, and as such lose their self-reliance, creativity, and willingness to think critically. The Atlantic recently published an article on the “adventure playground” movement, which describes the movement to bring some room for creativity back into this overly structured idea of play.
We can all agree that it’s important to give our children unstructured space to create, right? Right. Now get ready for a 360.
The real point of this article isn’t to talk about why easy access to technology is dangerous for your kids (although it is!), but rather how it’s dangerous for us, the adults.
Having these uber-connected mini computers in our pockets wreaks a similar type of havoc on us that isn’t easily measurable.
We’re becoming afraid to let ourselves be bored.
When you’re in line waiting for something, what do you do? Instead of letting our minds wander, we veer towards structure by pulling out our phones and opening up one of our many apps for outside stimulation. We consume from the firehose of our Twitter, Pulse, Quora, and Secret feeds — always checking to see if new information has come in. Instead of harnessing the natural creative tendencies of our minds, we turn to what is easy.
Think about what that emptiness of thought can offer you. It is the soil from which new thoughts and connections bloom. By giving yourself some quiet time for your brain to settle down and languish, you reinforce your ability to imagine and think for yourself. It’s okay to not obsess over always being productive. It’s okay to disconnect from the world. The Internet will still exist in 30 minutes when you’re at work. People won’t die if you wait an hour to respond to your email when you’re out.
Take back your time as a gift to yourself. Invest it in that small, quiet space your brain can go to play and create ideas, images, and spaces for itself. Believe in your own power to entertain — there’s no need to use distraction as a crutch to fight off a fear of nothingness.
Because nothingness is where we are the most free to create.
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