Awash in Chaos: Media, Distraction, and the Struggle for Deep Attention in Clinical Work

Chaos, Amusement, Infinite Jest, Deep Work and Ecclesiastes

We live in a chaos machine. That’s not just a metaphor—it’s the central argument of Max Fisher’s sobering analysis of how social media platforms are designed to fracture attention, exploit emotion, and monetize outrage. But the problem is bigger than Facebook, X, TikTok or …. Decades ago, Neil Postman warned that when media becomes the lens through which we know the world, even truth gets flattened into entertainment. Now, reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I see a culture not just amused to death—but numbed, overstimulated, and incapable of stillness. Together, these thinkers paint a picture of a society slowly losing its capacity for deep thought, meaningful dialogue, and sustained presence.

As clinicians, educators, and inquirers, we work in a world that increasingly treats deep reflection and sustained attention as luxuries—at best—or relics of the past at worst. But the stakes are high. Our students, clients, and colleagues all live in this environment. If we don’t consciously resist the noise, we risk allowing our practices to be shaped not by care or reason, but by algorithmic attention and reflexive certainty.

The Chaos Machine: Fisher’s Diagnosis

Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine makes it clear that the distraction we feel isn’t a personal failing—it’s engineered. Social media platforms aren’t neutral tools; they are systems designed to manipulate behavior. They reward speed, outrage, binary thinking, and repetition. They punish nuance, patience, and uncertainty.

The result? A cultural climate where everyone, including our clients and students, becomes more reactive, more anxious, more distracted—and more certain of things they haven’t really thought through.

For those of us trying to teach critical reasoning or deliver thoughtful care, that’s not just a nuisance. It’s an existential threat to the work.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Postman’s Prophecy

Neil Postman saw this coming. Writing in the 1980s, he argued that each medium carries with it an implicit epistemology—a way of knowing. In a print culture, arguments are built, sequenced, reasoned. In a television culture, arguments become entertainment—flattened into images, slogans, and soundbites.

Today, the logic of television has been superseded by the logic of the algorithm. Our epistemology isn’t just visual anymore—it’s viral. If it can’t be scrolled, clipped, or memed, it struggles to matter.

Postman’s concern was that truth would become indistinguishable from amusement. That’s happened. But more than that, we now face a new problem: not just that we’re amused—but that we’re exhausted by it.

Infinite Jest: Addiction to Distraction

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is many things—a dystopia, a satire, a spiritual lament. But at its core, it’s about what happens when entertainment becomes our central coping mechanism. The characters in the novel are trapped in cycles of addiction, performance, and loss of self. They long for sincerity but can’t find a language for it.

Reading Infinite Jest feels like swimming in the same current we’re all trying to escape—where everything competes for our attention and nothing holds it. The novel doesn’t offer easy solutions, but it names the hunger. Reading this massive tome (nearly 1,000 pages) captures the ache of living in a world full of stimulation but empty of depth.

That ache shows up in our clinics, classrooms, and those in-between moments when we’re trying to figure out what really matters.

How Do We Practice in the Midst of Chaos?

We don’t get to choose the time or culture we’re born into—but we do get to choose how we practice within it.

Cal Newport’s concept of “deep work” is not just for writers or knowledge workers. It’s an urgent frame for clinical practice. To be present with a client, to hold space for a student, to listen without jumping to diagnosis—these are all acts of resistance. They require focus, patience, attention, and care.

And this is where the voice of Ecclesiastes comes in with uncanny relevance. The Preacher names the futility of striving, the madness of endless information, and the weariness of the mind. He sees the chaos clearly:

“Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.”

But his response isn’t despair—it’s rootedness:

“There is nothing better for a person than to eat, drink, and find satisfaction in their toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God.”

It’s not a call to retreat. It’s a call to presence—to doing the work that is ours to do, with reverence and attentiveness, even in the midst of noise. The Preacher’s answer to distraction isn’t to escape it, but to engage meaningfully in what’s real and right in front of us.

Clinical Inquiry as Epistemological Resistance

Clinical Inquiry—when done well—is not just about what works. It’s about how we know, how we attend, how we reason and reflect. It pushes back against the algorithms of certainty, entertainment, and speed. It invites ambiguity. It prizes depth.

When we teach Clinical Inquiry, we are not just training better clinicians—we’re forming a different kind of person. One who can sit with complexity. One who can resist the urge to reduce everything to protocols or trending language. One who can care—not perform care, but actually be present to it.

This isn’t just good pedagogy. It’s cultural resistance.

Conclusion: Anchoring in the Chaos

So what do we do?

We slow down. We think carefully. We give our students and clients our full attention. We recognize when we’re being pulled under by the currents of distraction, and we gently pull ourselves back to the surface.

We teach Clinical Inquiry as a form of anchoring. We reframe clinical work as deep work. We read Ecclesiastes and find permission not to fix the world, but to be faithful within it.

We cannot stop the chaos machine. But we can choose not to live by its rules.

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