From Jesse Fox’s Church of Facebook:

I often complain about life’s little distractions; things like Facebook and a too-long to-do list and too many people to keep up with on more than a cursory level.  But here’s the problem with that: almost all of my distractions are my fault.

I once had an argument with someone in the wealth management business– pardon me, she was an “advisor”– in which she insisted that people whose homes were underwater had only themselves to blame, moral hazard, etc.. I argued that ultimately we’re responsible for the choices we make, but at a practical level, companies that made loads of money designing campaigns to prey on the financially illiterate and vulnerable, that even built into their own models assumptions of high default rates (who the Hell offers mortgages to people who have a significant chance of defaulting after the first payment?!) couldn’t claim to have been innocent bystanders. I’ve come to think the attention economy contains such players, too.

Fundamentally, I agree with Fox’s argument that distraction is a choice, but that’s not to let companies whose business models demand absorbing as much of our time and attention as possible off the hook. If we live in a world that offers more opportunities for distraction, it’s partly because there are more organized efforts to create and place such opportunities in our path. But we still have the power to resist, if only we recognize it.