The Fog We Keep Calling Normal
Maybe the problem is not that we are distracted. Maybe it is that we have adjusted to being distracted.
A few weeks ago, I went 72 hours without my phone or smartwatch.
That should not sound like some grand act of courage, but I will admit it felt a little more dramatic than I expected. I did not head into the wilderness, renounce technology, or suddenly become the kind of person who journals at sunrise and speaks softly about being centered. I just went a few days without the constant access point most of us carry around like an extra limb.
At first, what I noticed most was the reflex. I reached for a phone that was not there. I wanted to check the time on a watch I was not wearing. I had those small, ridiculous moments where my hand moved before my brain had much say in the matter.
That got my attention, mostly because there is something humbling about realizing how often you are not making a choice as much as living on autopilot.
After a while, though, my mind felt less jumpy. I had longer stretches of thought. I noticed more. I was not magically transformed, but I was clearer. The fog lifted enough that I could tell it had been there in the first place.
That may have been the most uncomfortable part.
It reminded me of a gift my daughters gave me a couple of years ago, Celeste Headlee’s book Do Nothing. There are many ways to interpret a gift from your children, and this one did not require a decoder ring. It was loving, thoughtful, and just direct enough to land where it needed to land.
They saw something I probably needed to see.
I laughed when they gave it to me, but I also knew there was truth in it. I have always had a pretty high motor. That has helped me as an athlete, a coach, an HR leader, a business owner, and probably as a dad, at least on my better days. I believe in work. I believe in effort. I believe in showing up and doing what needs to be done.
Having a high motor and being unable to leave space alone are not the same thing.
That distinction has been sitting with me.
We have gotten very good at filling space. The few minutes before a meeting. The line at the coffee shop. The walk from the parking lot. The red light. The pause at the end of the day when, for once, nothing is asking for us.
Except something is almost always asking for us now.
A text. An email. A headline. A post. A score. A calendar alert. A reminder. A message we probably did not need to answer right away but did anyway because the device was there and the muscle memory was already in motion.
None of this feels especially damaging in the moment. That is part of the issue. Each little check feels harmless, even useful. Over time, though, I wonder how much of our attention gets chopped into pieces so small we stop noticing what it used to feel like to be fully present.
That is where the recent post about people turning their iPhones into “dumb phones” caught my eye. The basic idea is not complicated. Take the most distracting tool most of us own and strip it back down to what we actually need. Calls. Texts. Maps. Maybe music. Less slot machine in your pocket and more, well, phone.
I do not think everyone needs to do that. I am not even sure I am ready to do that. But I do think the interest in it says something.
A lot of people are starting to question the bargain.
We wanted convenience and got dependency. We wanted connection and got constant availability. We wanted information and got a firehose pointed at our nervous systems. We wanted tools that made life easier and somehow ended up feeling like we are never quite off the clock.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I want to be careful here. Mental health is not a clever theme for a leadership post. For many people, it is deeply personal and hard-earned, involving real struggle, real support, real treatment, and real courage.
At the same time, I do think there is an everyday part of the conversation worth naming. We cannot talk honestly about mental health and ignore the conditions we keep creating for our own minds. Not just in crisis, but in the ordinary patterns we repeat so often that they become invisible.
The way we start the day. The way we end it. The way we move from one thing to the next without ever letting the last thing settle. The way we call it responsiveness when it might actually be restlessness. The way we treat quiet like something to fix.
For leaders, this matters more than we sometimes want to admit.
Leadership takes attention.
It takes the ability to listen without already preparing your answer. It takes the ability to notice what is not being said. It takes enough space between the thing that happens and your reaction to decide who you actually want to be in that moment.
That is hard to do when your mind is always bracing for the next input.
I see this in coaching conversations all the time. Leaders want to be more strategic, more present, more patient, more creative, more grounded. They want to stop getting pulled into every fire. They want to think bigger and lead better. Then they describe days that leave almost no room for an original thought to form without being interrupted.
I am not judging that. I have lived plenty of it myself.
But I do think we need to stop pretending it has no cost.
When attention gets thin, leadership gets thin. Decisions become more reactive. Conversations become more transactional. Listening becomes more performative. We start scanning instead of seeing. We start answering instead of thinking. We start confusing being available with being present.
Those are not the same thing.
I keep coming back to that because I know how easy it is to fool ourselves. We can be responsive and still not be clear. We can be productive and still be depleted. We can be connected to everyone and still feel strangely disconnected from ourselves.
That is the fog.
And when enough people are living in it, fog starts to look like weather.
I am not planning to throw my phone into Lake Travis or start communicating by carrier pigeon, though I admit there are days when the pigeon model has some appeal. Technology is not going away, and I am not interested in pretending otherwise.
But I am interested in paying closer attention to the trade.
Do I need to fill this space?
Do I need to answer this right now?
Do I need to bring my phone into this room?
Do I need to know everything the minute it happens?
Do I need to call this leadership, or is this just another habit wearing a name badge?
Those questions are not dramatic, but they are useful. They are also a little inconvenient, which is usually a sign they are worth asking.
Maybe doing nothing is not laziness. Maybe it is part of how we recover enough mental room to actually do the things that matter well.
Maybe protecting attention is not self-indulgent. Maybe it is one of the more practical leadership disciplines we have left.
The fog we keep calling normal is not harmless just because it is common.
Once you remember what clear feels like, it gets harder to pretend the noise is harmless.
About Brian Vogel
Brian is a leadership coach with more than 25 years of HR executive experience at Indeed, USAA, Verizon, and LogicMonitor. He helps leaders delegate with confidence, build team ownership, and make time for the decisions only they can make.
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