I’ve got an introductory essay in Living Tomorrow, “a new anthology of creative, thought-provoking visions of the future” featuring work

by young people ages 13-25 from across the United States and worldwide. The science fiction stories featured in the volume, published by Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, Intel’s Tomorrow Project and the Society for Science & the Public, examine futures shaped by environmental and biological science and technology.

You can read more about the Tomorrow Project here, and download the volume as a PDF. Fortunately for all concerned, my piece isn’t fiction (I’m one of those writers who would love to be able to write fiction in the same way I’d love to be lead guitarist— it’s never going to happen, and the world is better off if I don’t try). Instead it’s more a riff on focus, mind-wandering, and everyday digital life.

t’s a typical Saturday morning in our Silicon Valley home. My wife is grading papers. My daughter and her friends are at basketball practice; my son and his friend are on an arcane quest to create the perfect Magic: The Gathering card deck. I’m at my desk, swapping out the hard drive on my aging MacBook Pro….

I like opening my computer, feeling my way through a designer’s clever tricks, and methodically taking it apart and reassembling it. Upgrading is a challenge, but if I keep a clear head, work slowly (I’ve broken things by being too hasty), and let myself sink into the task, I know it’ll work. Happiness psychologists would recognize this immediately: it’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow,” the feeling of total absorption in a task that is one of life’s most rewarding and sustaining states. But we’ve entered an age in which the technology industry has refined flow into a heroin-strong narcotic, an additive that makes Web sites, apps, and games more addictive.

Of course, the tech companies have a long history of calling their consumers “users,” but today they really mean it. Designers use insights from psychology, behavioral economics, and sociology to create weapons of mass distraction aimed at capturing as much of our time and attention as possible, reselling some of it to advertisers, and using the rest to stoke our appetite for in-app purchases and upgrades.

Part of the devious genius of these technologies is that they scale magnificently: games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga can absorb an evening at home, or a few minutes in line. This means that they don’t just make it harder for us to concentrate, sap our patience for challenges, and erode our capacity to focus. They also eat into the time we used to spend doing nothing at all, engaging in what psychologists now call “mind-wandering.” Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turkle have done a fine job of explaining what’s lost when we’re reduced to a state of perpetual semi-distraction. But we’re only now beginning to realize that mind-wandering is just as important for our mental health and creative lives.

For me, the piece was a chance to explore the connection between focus and mind-wandering, and how digital distractions erode both.

I hadn’t realized when I started this project just ho much it would be a sequel to The Distraction Addiction: that book was about the importance of learning to cultivate focus in a high-tech world, and Rest is about the importance of learning to cultivate mind-wandering in a high-tech world. I’m not revising my earlier argument, but complementing and completing it: just as work and rest are not opposites but partners, I think that ten years from now I’ll look back on two books as part of a bigger whole.

Who knows, maybe there will be a third or fourth book that I haven’t yet imagined.