A man sits down in an empty train carriage, his gaze is drawn towards the window, his eyes flitting backwards and forwards, from pylon to pylon. Sometimes, he focuses on a tree. It turns on its axis with the motion of the train. Just as he registers how pleasant the sensation is, this ‘frail travelling coincidence’ held in mind – of tree, sky, technology, thought and matter – he turns away. His phone is buzzing, yes, that thing clutched in his hand. His features flushed with expectation and urgency, he grapples and prods and flicks its plastic screen into life. He is already absolutely absorbed in it, the landscape no longer illuminated by his mind.

Few make it as far as my lonely traveller, who at least registers the scene around him, if only for a moment, before he is pulled into the vast orbit of his phone. How often have I seen people go through this curious set of movements, before a concert, on the railways, in aeroplanes. For a second, they stare into space. And as if suddenly conscious of some interior blankness, some essential lack, they quickly pop out their phones and begin to play, suddenly a picture of concentration.

This focus can be so all-consuming that it occludes all other phenomena. What if the people who play TikTok videos in buses and trains are simply unaware of what they are doing? What makes moped theft of mobile phones so easy? Whenever I see someone walking towards me, smartphone in hand, neck craned, I keep a steady course – it’s a test to see if they realise where they are. Very often, it ends with a last-minute awkward side-step. The diffusion of visual and verbal technologies in everyday life, mediated by the smartphone, has had many casualties. The examples are endless – the internet café trade in printing off boarding passes or paperwork must surely have shrivelled – but the most hyped casualty of all, the human attention span, is not one of them. In a large-scale study conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute, published in late 2023, nearly 12,000 children, between age 9 and 12 across the United States, had MRI scans conducted of their brains over three years, to measure ‘functional brain connectivity’. Researchers at the University of Oxford commented: ‘There was no meaningful association between screen time use and measures of cognitive and mental well-being, even when the evidential threshold was set very low.’

That seems counter-intuitive – I certainly feel scattier than in the pre-internet era in the sense that I feel more conscious of a mental division between what I am doing now, and what I could be reading, or looking at. But that may be a quirk of modern culture, which repeatedly tells its unhappy subjects to ‘be more present’ and ‘live in the moment’. The mindfulness movement has undoubtedly promoted powerful, age-old techniques, common to cultures of East and West, that deal directly with feelings of panic, anxiety and alienation. Breathing techniques really do still the mind when carried out properly; the mind’s eye really does give relief to an anxious brain if it is directed towards the rhythms of the body and the breath.

Mindfulness has deep roots in the quietist tradition of western thought, best exhibited by Stoic philosophy as it was transmitted from Greek culture by Roman authors such as Seneca, Nero’s philosophical tutor. He urges his friend Lucilius to ‘hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow. While we are postponing, life speeds by.’ And yet, its commercialisation in western Europe and America, its dissemination in gamified apps, in faux-profound language of the advertising world and across the legacy media, has led the expansion of a perfectly useful set of simple meditation techniques, and a component of virtually all philosophical and religious traditions, into a pseudo-philosophy of life.

If ‘being present’, ‘turning up as the best version of you’, could save our souls, then our worries would surely have come to an end many generations ago. Indeed, Seneca’s philosophical texts go on to complicate, enrich and deepen those opening sentiments. Being present isn’t enough – you have to go further, cultivate knowledge, change the way you relate to others, and so on and so forth. Psychological health for the human animal is more complex and trickier than that. Tolstoy captures some of the complexities of what it means for human beings to be ‘present’ in the opening stages of Anna Karenina. When the dilettante aristocrat Stiva Oblonsky wakes up from a pleasant and absurd dream featuring singing tables and decanters in the shape of women, he remembers his troubles; his wife is furious with him, his household in uproar after the discovery of his affair with the au-pair. Tolstoy shows Oblonksy a way out from his worrying: ‘There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day – that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till night time; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life.’

This dramatic tension between ‘the needs of the day’ and how we navigate them, authentically and naturally, body and soul intact, emerges again and again in European thought. That sometimes, to get through life, we need to get away from ourselves, to live, as it were, suspended in dreams. The French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, in his Essais, held a great deal of admiration for the ethical assumptions of Stoicism and its status in Renaissance thought as an alternative wellspring of inspiration to Christian apologetics. And yet, he often gently criticised its core assumptions, many of which had become fashionable talking points among the well-off classes of his era. Indeed, that neo-Stoicism is popular among tech moguls and Silicon Valley billionaires would not have surprised Montaigne one jot. In Our emotions get carried away beyond us, he writes:

Those who reproach humanity with always gaping towards the future and who teach us to grasp present goods and to be satisfied with them since we have no hold over what is to come – less hold, even, than we have over the past – touch upon the most common of human aberrations (if we dare use the word ‘aberration’ for something towards which Nature herself brings us in the service of the perpetuation of her handiwork, impressing this false thought upon us as she does many others, more ardently, more concerned as she is for us to do than to know). We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more.

This human aberration is the imagination, our propensity to be always looking outside ourselves, for inspiration, for love, and for objects similar to the images we hold in our interior. In his Essai, How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects when lacking real ones, Montaigne reflects on the way a mind in shock turns to justifications in the world ‘out there’ for the things it is feeling ‘in here’:

The soul too … loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless it is given something to grasp onto; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon. Plutarch says of those who dote over pet monkeys or little dogs that the faculty of loving which is in all of us, rather than remaining useless forges a false and frivolous object for want of a legitimate one.

While accepting the Stoic assumption that paying attention to the present is no bad thing, Montaigne, so elegantly and humanely, illustrates the obstacles the mind throws up against this pursuit. ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ wrote TS Eliot. We constantly want to be drawn outside of ourselves, to find some ‘false and frivolous object’ when a real one won’t do. When channelled successfully, this basic human impulse is both adaptive and central to achievement of all kinds. How else do we run impossible odds on the slim chance of success? Why build a cathedral when a church would do? Why make sacrifices in the present to achieve a potentially illusory future goal? This is, as Montaigne puts it, nature’s way of telling us to get on with things, to get out there, play sport, fall in love, do business, tell stories, to live the human comedy as if it were really serious, to live the dream of life.

My contention is that we have not lost our ability to focus – we are just focusing on the wrong things, things which don’t help us build cathedrals, or risk the present for a more glorious future. The paradox of the smartphone is that it promotes a fugue state that combines distraction and focus, not unlike the ‘flow’ state said to be so crucial for human creativity. This ‘flow’ state, untutored by culture, unregulated by taste and style, when misdirected to the wrong kind of goals, can wreak terrible results. No less than the grand history of the European novel begins with this assumption. In the first chapter of Miguel De Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the inspiration for all that came afterwards in literature, he pictures Don Quixote on his modest country estate, ‘a very early riser and a great lover of the hunt’. He has one great vice: ‘This aforementioned gentleman spent his times of leisure – which meant most of the year – reading books of chivalry with so much devotion and enthusiasm that he forgot almost completely about the hunt and even about the administration of his estate.’ It gets worse:

Our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courting, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer.

He leaves his estate and goes out into the world, in search of adventure. And many adventures do take place, none of them much like the chansons de geste nurtured in his imagination. His reading takes him out into the world. False and frivolous the objects of his desire may be, but the genius of Cervantes is to weave Don Quixote’s appetite for story – that basic, recognisable, childlike impulse to bathe in the sea of story – into an infinitely rich text, a creation governed by an altogether different set of rules to the simple chivalric code: a universe where fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, in which storytelling can lead to a fuller apprehension of what it means to be alive, leading us from fantasy back into the real world.

In a world of smartphones, the natural propensity to want to get outside the narrow confines of this body, this soul, is being misdirected. Snatches of text upon snatches of text, video upon video, these visual phenomena are steadily producing a culture which more and more reflects them, an increasingly fissiparous public, wired to seek personal stimulation. But there is a way out. I’ll return to that image of the man in an empty train carriage. His phone has just run out of battery. He mutters and prods it, but no, it’s gone. Nothing for it. He looks up out of the window. The landscape is still there, of course. It will always be there, just waiting for our reveries to bring it back to life.

If you enjoyed this essay by Alastair, listen in through the link below to him in conversation with Paul Lay:

Or watch the conversation on YouTube: