The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew Crawford

English language

Published April 19, 2016

ISBN:: 978-0-374-53591-9

(10 reviews)

We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.

Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature.

The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we …

The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.

2 editions

Sean Bala reviewed The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew Crawford

I cannot emphasis how much I loved this book.

5 stars

I cannot emphasis how much I loved this book. The book opened my mind to some of the deepest issues and problems in modern society and completely changed the way that I think about identity and the self. Crawford, known for his first book "Shopclass as Soulcraft" uses the modern inability to give attention as the jumping off point to explore identity formation. Very briefly, Crawford argues that one of the inheritances we have from the Enlightenment (largely thanks to Kant) is that we think of our identities as formed entirely by mental processes. This fallacy leads us down many dark roads. The main philosophical argument can be summed up as the following (only articulated in the middle of the book):

- We are encouraged to free ourselves from all authorities, including the authority of others;
- This leads us to emphasize radical self-responsibility (as a matter of politics and epistemology);
- We can only do this by locating the source of truth from our external world to our inner world - by constructing representations of life;
- To accomplish this, we must demote attention as a value as it takes us outside of the mental realm which is the center of all authority.

Once you understand it, you begin to see the web that binds us to these means of identity formation. The way out is to conceive of identity formation as a relationship between us, our environments, and the people around us. And it involves a dynamic relationship between our own creative powers and the tradition we receive.