Even the 'Infinite' Ruler of the Universe Wants to Become a 'Finite' Human

The book “Stolen Focus” is truly quite different from “Deep Work”! There’s one idea from the book that keeps spinning in my head: we’ve become too sensitive to instant rewards. This mechanism tempts us to become seemingly “infinitely” addicted within our “finite” lives, endlessly scrolling our fingers across screens, checking messages the moment our phone buzzes, completely disregarding our most precious asset—attention.

This reminded me of a story I read recently: after we die, we become rulers of the universe, managing vast galaxies every day and handling endless complex affairs. But whenever we get a vacation, we choose to become human again, even if only for a brief moment.

Why return to this limited body? Because as a human, we possess an ability that even gods envy—we can focus on the present moment, focus on the people and things right in front of us.

This “finitude” is precisely our privilege. Yesterday afternoon, after class, my dorm was too noisy so I was reading on the balcony. When I looked up, I saw a large bird flying by, and suddenly my thoughts flew along with it. At that moment, I thought of this story. Each individual’s life experience is extremely small (I’ve seen the prosperity of Hong Kong but never the geese in Canadian lakes, haha), but I have the opportunity to immerse myself in everything before me, beautiful or not.

Sadly, today’s social media is stripping away this capacity for perception. They exploit our biological tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, immersing us in seemingly “infinite” gratification. Those companies in Silicon Valley have sophisticated algorithms—like Facebook’s infinite scroll and constantly popping notification badges—designed not to make you happier, but to maximize profit, to capture your attention and sell it to advertisers. This isn’t just a matter of personal willpower; it’s a systemic design. The book mentions that when tech companies make changes to protect users’ attention, it leads to decreased profits, so they end up cutting those features.

But as individuals, where should we place this pursuit of instant rewards? I don’t think we should deny it, but rather work with our biology. Our brains have two types of memory: short-term memory based on chemical neurotransmitters and long-term memory based on neural structures. Building a system where we can harvest instant rewards in the short term while moving toward long-term goals—in other words, feeling good while advancing in the direction we want—is a pretty good model. Because it’s not about removing all negative things to make life flourish; rather, we need to fill it with things we’re passionate about, things we won’t regret doing in our finite lives, things that truly make us happy. (I haven’t completely figured it out either. I just thought about a friend’s post over dinner and couldn’t come up with a 100 percent certain answer. Also, I’m not saying short-term memory is bad—especially for students, haha. Constantly stimulating your brain before exams, even though the knowledge pretty much disappears afterward, going from “60 points is victory” to “a respectable 80” is still a pretty good experience.)

I remember seeing a definition of “happiness” back when I still had WeChat Moments open: Happiness is an elevation and intoxication of the soul. “From a practical perspective, many people’s lives are filled with various worries and sorrows, with hardly any joy to speak of throughout their lives; from a spiritual perspective, happiness belongs to a kind of intoxication and elevation of the soul, which the vast majority of people cannot reach, because they have never been able to perceive and touch their own or others’ souls, or even know what it is.” Those who are unhappy are often so because they’ve never had the chance to touch or perceive their own or others’ souls. This is very similar to what the book describes: how do we achieve a state of complete immersion?

For me, like the author, starting with reading might be the best recipe—an elegant balance of focus and wandering: you can feel the author’s distilled thoughts while having spare cognitive bandwidth to build connections between ideas. Especially with books that challenge you, it’s not just about comfortable reading that makes you feel immersed, but about seeing many blind spots. Although knowledge is infinite, a new perspective from a book might just be the answer to the problem in front of you. “The Deng Xiaoping Era” has many details: walking around the house continuously during his period of exile, inserting about 30 minutes of walking into 3-hour morning document reviews during the founding of the Deng Xiaoping era… These allow my restless heart to find moments of immersion, and I realize that compared to managing China during that special period, managing Guangdong, managing Shanghai, or managing an individual—the difficulties I face are just a drizzle.

This brought me a lot of peace. I used to always think that not focusing at my desk was wasting life (I totally relate to the author’s dry joke, haha), but after thinking about it, I realized that kind of active, wandering “distraction” is actually another form of focus that nourishes our creativity.

In contrast, our current “distraction” is passive and fragmented. That’s a completely different thing.

I’m quite grateful that before I became fully aware of my own existence (maybe that’s how to put it?), I was addicted to “League of Legends” (LOL) rather than short videos. Although gaming is also entertainment, a single game lasts thirty to forty minutes, even an hour, requiring high focus, team coordination, and strategic thinking. At least it trained my focus muscles, rather than having my attention shattered like short videos do.

Maybe during the Spring Festival break, I can return to the state I had in senior year when I secretly read classic novels—like when I read “Gone with the Wind” or “And Quiet Flows the Don.” That might be, aside from a few enchanting gatherings I’ve attended, the highest form of focus—empathy. Just like the definition of “happiness” I mentioned before, books are a mirror. Through reading others’ stories and touching the souls of characters in books, we ultimately see in the mirror that complex self, perhaps one that even we ourselves find hard to accept.

Of course, it’s hard to stay clear-headed in this noise-filled world. To some extent, it’s all a “makeshift production”—everyone is telling their own stories, but rarely truly listening to what others are saying, rarely having genuine dialogues, rarely fully enjoying their own attention.

But we still have small leverage points to move it (as the author says, you need a certain privilege to start thinking, but the discussions among friends are truly treasures). For example, the most important thing is sleep—no matter what’s happening externally (though when the sky is falling, you really can’t sleep), you must recognize that only by protecting your sleep can you have the energy to fight the world. For instance, I’ve recently been using the simplest Microsoft To-Do to jot down worries during focus time, then immersing myself fully in the present. Or simply allowing yourself to zone out for a while, watching birds fly back and forth outside the window.

Even if this is a systemic social problem, even if we’re in a giant bubble, as individuals, we still have the right to choose to live wholeheartedly in the present.