“The attitude toward time and environment known as ‘multitasking’ does not represent civilizational progress. Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an attitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness. We owe the cultural achievements of humanity-which include philosophy-to deep, contemplative attention. […] Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible.”
- Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
i consider my lowest point to be the countless hours i spent breeding competitive pokemon, below even my 40+ hour minecraft weeks (because at least i have something to show for those!). it is partially in reaction to that long dark era of my life that i'm now on a site called "suboptimalism", because acquiring so-called "competitively viable" pokemon required relentless optimization of randomly-generated stats, which meant hatching dozens of pokemon eggs until you got lucky and got a good onerejected draft of my manifesto's first paragraph: "you’ve probably noticed it around you, optimalism culture. minmaxing ourselves like we’re trying to be “competitively viable” pokémon. oh, your iv’s are no good? you have the wrong nature? sorry, but it’s too late. not even effort values can save you now. you get to spend the rest of your life in The Box.". back during pokemon X/Y when i was furthest into it, you couldn't avoid it if you wanted good "legit" pokemon for official competitions, since there was no way to "fix" bad stats.
it was also a fairly tedious process back then, requiring lots of moving around different places and navigating various menus, since game freak loves to glacially trickle out the most basic quality-of-life changes. as a result, over the course of my lengthy pokemon breeding fixation, i got the playtime on my copy of pokemon Y up to an astounding and frankly disgusting 991:50
i'm glad that i didn't manage to max out the clock at 999:59 because i strongly suspect that if i had, i may be stuck playing it forever, like a magical artifact received from a mysterious stranger alongside an ominous warning not to use it longer than the time limit.... pokemon games are never all that deep or replayable (they're for kids! twitch beat it! a goldfish beat it!), so if you ever see anyone with a stratospheric playtime it is almost guaranteed they've been doing something phenomenally pointless and/or repetitive. in my case, the most egregious part that elevates this one of the biggest wastes of time in history and which i can barely even begin to account for is the fact that after all that time and effort spent breeding competitive pokemon, i barely spent any time actually competing. i was so terrified of losing that i almost never battled with anyone, even in anonymous online battles where the only thing at stake was a couple of elo points. then, i'd make a pilgrimmage to the occasional in-person regional tournament, convinced i would do well thanks to all the effort i put into breeding pokemon with perfect stats, only to come in like 70th when my underdeveloped strategies collapsed in the face of real-world challenges. although it's not my main point here, there's another little lesson in here: fetishizing gear and preparation over actual practice and execution will doom you, there's no way to make up for a lack of genuine experience.
anyways, it is not as if breeding pokemon is particularly fun, in fact it is exceptionally reptitive and boring, like working on a virtual assembly line, or playing a slot machine where you have to watch the reels spin for five minutes before finding out you lost again
it was possible to automate the process somewhat at the egg-hatching stage: around the not-Eiffel tower at the center of lumiose city, there was a circular path that you could circle around infinitely by shoving a thin coin underneath the 3DS circle pad to hold it stuck in one direction, which i did so much that the circle pad on my 3DS actually came off one day. the damage to the + pad is from an unrelated incident.. the only thing that made it bearable was doing something else at the same time, which mostly meant watching tv. i half-watched entire seasons of forgettable shows in the background while breeding pokemon, usually at home alone, but it also became one of my primary social activies since my best friend was into pokemon as well (though not nearly to the same extent), so i'd go over to his house and we'd both vegetate on the couch in his living room glued to our respective 3DS, tv playing our favorite shows in the background. i can't even say that breeding pokemon while watching tv was particularly fun or entertaining, but it offered just enough constant baseline stimulation that i was able to enter a state of "dark flow", melting the hours away effortlessly.
the pokemon obsession continued throughout all of high school and then right into college, during which i dutifully purchased every new pokemon game on release, even going extra-degen mode and buying both versions of each game. it lasted until the release of pokemon ultra sun/ultra moon, the final pokemon game(s) for the DS line. i got embarrassingly excited for every new pokemon release and this one was no exception, especially since based off of no evidence whatsoever i'd built the games up in my head into a pair of epic sequels with completely new storylines and an extensive postgame, kind of on the model of black and white version 2 (which to this day is where i believe the series peaked). when they came out, i picked up ultra moon right away and ran through the game at a breakneck pace trying to get to the new content, putting in maybe 20 hours over the course of just a couple days. the new content is just ahead, i kept reassuring myself as i continued slogging through a game that was pretty much a carbon copy of the one i had already played through twice less than a year ago (since i had purchased both sun and moon). before i knew it, i had finished the game without encountering any significant new content. ah, must be all in the postgame, i naively coped, despite the fact that no pokemon game since black and white version 2 has had a substantive postgame. a few hours later, i completed the meager postgame, and it gradually dawned on me: that was it, that was the sum total of the new content, that was all they had made to justify an entire new release.
to my sheltered teenage self, this represented The Greatest Betrayal Of My Life. pokemon, my trusted companion since the good old gen IV days in elementary school, had promised me the world once again, and instead they shamelessly FUCKED ME. they had TRICKED me into shelling out another FIFTY CLAMS and wasting TWENTY HOURS of my PRECIOUS YOUTH playing the SAME MID-ASS GAME a THIRD GODDAMN TIME. i was genuinely furious, and my anger was so strong that it broke the spell and suddenly snapped me out of my years-long mindless pokemon consumption trance. now lucid, i was able to look at pokemon with complete objectivity and saw the truth: i realized it wasn't just pokemon ultra moon that was bad, in fact every pokemon game since they had transitioned to 3D in X/Y had been dogshit all along. not only that, there's absolutely no hope for improvement because no matter how much of a smelly turd game freak craps out, as long as it has the pokemon logo tacked oncase in point: when game freak made a non-pokemon game a few years ago, "small town hero" or whatever it was called, it was a total mess and ended up flopping it's a guaranteed success from all the brainwashed pokemon fans lining up to buy it upon release, no questions asked.
then i thought about the past couple of years i had spent "playing" pokemon, and i was horrified. why had i spent so much time on competitive breeding, an activity so boring that it essentialy required something else at the same time to distract from it? what the hell had i been doing? how had i fallen into such a horrible trap? my sudden mental paradigm shift had been a clean break, it was hard to go back and figure out what had even been going through my mind back then, it was like i had been a different person, but at the very least i could make sure it wouldn't happen again. it seemed to me as though where i had gone wrong was engaging in something so boring that i couldn't do it on its own, so from that moment on, i resolved to do only one thing at a time. it's a simple but powerful heuristic: if something is too boring or useless to do alone, it is probably not worth doing. everything i do should at least be worth investing my full attention in.
as people seek to reclaim their attention spans after years of decay, i think the "one thing at a time" principle is increasingly relevant as a potential starting point. it is generally acccepted that smartphones are one of the biggest culprit in the great theft of attention, and i think one of the reasons why is because they've enabled doing more than one thing on an unprecedented scale. thanks to smartphones, there are many who multitask full time now, existing on an intermediate plane between this world and cyberspace, attention perpetually divided and never fully present here nor there. i see it all around: putting on a youtube video while eating a meal or going to sleep, watching tiktoks in the show or while the tv plays in the background, having a conversation in real life while also chatting with someone on discord, sending texts and snapchats while driving.
although i don't think the "one thing at a time" principle is enough to entirely reconquer an attention span (sitting down and watching tiktoks for two straight hours is still technically "one thing at a time"), its simplicity makes it an excellent starting point. simple rules are easier to stick to and implement, no need to worry about arcane edge cases, and you can always choose how seriously to take iti take it to a fairly extreme degree by avoiding even listening to music while doing other things. this is probably the absolute hottest take i’ve ever cooked up but i'm convinced people are listening to too much music these days, the amount of people i see around who seem to have ear buds permanently shoved in their ears is staggering and frankly a little disturbing. a lot of those same people claim to "love" music so much that they can never go without it, which to me brings to mind meth addicts talking about how much they love meth. are they truly appreciating music and doing it justice by relegating it to the status of permanent background noise? should you even bother listening to songs that do not DEMAND your full attention? i'm not against playing music when the vibes are right, but is a soundtrack really needed every time you go to 7-11 for a quick coke?. i can't say i have much evidence for its efficacy, but i personally credit it with helping me retain the ability to focus long enough to read a lot of long stuff old books, which is perhaps the ultimate "one thing at a time" activity (meditation doesn't count because ideally it's supposed to be doing no thing, not one thing).
defying large-scale societal trends comes with downsides, though, when you have to walk among the fallen. most people are now used to a far higher baseline level of stimulation, so they will frequently feel the need to put on "background noise" that can be difficult to tune out, like tv shows or movies. right now i'm at a point where i can't even read books while listening to any sort of music, so if somebody puts on any sort of video it's so distracting that i'm basically forced to watch it no matter how little it interests me, because i can't focus on anything else in its presence. at the very least, people don't tend to be too picky about what's put on in the background, so usually i can get them to agree to put on something i want to watch. but those minor inconveniences are nothing compared to my ultimate reward, a feeling of entirely justified smug superiority for not being just another mindless dopamine-addicted npc like everyone else...