It's getting harder and harder for us humans to concentrate for any length of time. The number of distractions surrounding us grows at an exponential pace. Attention is the new oil – businesses want to capture and monetise your attention. While scrolling through cat videos is a pleasant enough way to pass the time, is it making the most of our human potential? Are we doomed to graze on digitised mush, rather than to achieve mastery of a given specialisation?
If I have mastered one thing, it's writing and editing in the English language to a competent degree. Something that large language model AI is mastering very quickly. But I cannot mend clothes, fix a broken drainpipe, attach a display cabinet to a wall or dig a fence post. And it's too late to learn.
We are bombarded by stimuli. My email inboxes have multiple items jostling for my immediate attention. 'Read this!' 'Click here!' 'This is important!' 'Hey! There's someone on the internet who's wrong! He needs correcting! "the Ford Cortina was originally the Ford Consul Cortina before the 1964 facelift that saw a full-width grille replacing separate elliptical sidelights!" And here's my generalist's problem. My knowledge is broad and superficial rather than deep and practical. My only real skill is knowing lots of rules about grammar and punctuation what have you. Not particularly valuable in a survivalist scenario.
How long can I focus for? How long before I click on the Facebook icon? What can I do to increase the time dedicated to a single task?
My to-do list is the cornerstone of my day. Writing it all down. Prioritising stuff. Whittling down that which needs to be done from that which it would be nice to do. (Is cleaning really that important in the great scheme of things? Number one of the seven things to do today, it's the only one without a tick beside it. Cleaning can wait.) Three business-related calls, one potential member, emails that need writing, an article to edit, a small local shopping trip folded into my walk...
Tomorrow I set off to Kraków, to deliver my mother's wartime suitcase and collection of exercise books from school (SMO, Palestine, 1942-45). One thing amazes me about them is the total focus. No graffiti, no doodles, no jokes in the margins (i.e. entirely unlike my school exercise books). Heads-down no-nonsense studying. Intense concentration. Diligence. She was a long way from home, with horrors behind her and nothing but uncertainty ahead. What to do? Just get on with it. Study hard. Commit stuff to memory if it can't be explained and understood.

Did it come in handy? If anything, the mindset and the work ethic did. Ending up in postwar Britain with no money, no family wealth to fall back on and precious little English, she did the right thing – learnt a specialised skill (comptometer operator) and worked at that until she retired. Not an interesting or glamorous job, but it was a skill that few people had. Quickly and accurately entering large columns of figures (pounds, shillings and pence) into a mechanical calculator and totting up the revenues of the businesses she worked for. Early on in her career, before her ten-year maternity break, she was earning more than my father as a junior civil engineer. Both parents established themselves materially as specialists, with a skill that was hard to acquire and few possessed.
My father's speciality was soil mechanics. His job was to calculate the structural loads of buildings, bridges and embankments on the ground on which they stood. The responsibility for getting it right was huge (One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, the UK's tallest skyscraper from 1991 to 2012, stands on the foundations, 222 piles, driven 23m into the riverbed, that he had designed).
My parents wanted me to go into sciences or engineering. My O-levels (physics, chemistry and biology) were intended to set me in that direction. But I chose another path; so for A-levels, I did English, French and history, going to university to become an arch-generalist (Comparative American Studies, soft stuff), though topped off with a postgrad diploma in journalism (at last a trade, a skill).
Today's world, is so full of bright, noisy, distracting things, all jostling for young people's attention as they decide what they want to do with their lives, what they want to study, and once studying, distracting them further. Scroll on down, young fellows, scroll on down until you reach the very last video on TikTok.
Inherited wealth will allow more and more young people to choose what paths they want to follow, rather than chase the money doing hard things. With AI about to usher in an age of leisure, how many will follow the specialist's path, and how many will stay a generalist?
This time two years ago:
AI, metacognition and artificial consciousness
(Two years on, the jury is still out. I watched Joscha Bach on IAI last night stating absolutely that artificial consciousness is around the corner, because consciousness is computational, while Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose is equally sure that consciousness is not computational. I ask Gemini AI this question and the state-of-the-art reply, 8 May 2025 is: "There isn't a definitive scientific consensus yet, but there are compelling arguments on both sides".)
This time nine years ago:
Baletowa Blues
This time 11 years ago:
Two rainbows
This time 12 years ago:
Dandelions in bloom
This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw's city centre - a deli-free zone
This time 14 years ago:
Patching up the holes
This time 16 years ago:
In search of the sublime aesthetic
This time 18 years ago:
Flying in from the Faroes