# Distracted by Others By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-10-24 We are in the Age of Choice, where we must decide what is worth our time, energy, and focus. This is a reasonably new age, so many people and organizations still remember the Age of Information, where information was suddenly widely available and sought. For many of those who grew up in the Age of Information, the transition to Choice has not gone well. They are used to paying attention to everything because that is where they believe the competitive and status advantage lived. Today, the information is available to nearly everyone who looks for it. Furthermore, one can know more about everyone and everything else. This means information is not only a cheap commodity for everyone but has become an overwhelming distraction. Hence, we must choose what is essential. Yet, most individuals from the Age of Information are still stuck monitoring what is endlessly happening around them. Organizations believe in benchmarking themselves against everyone else and every fad available. Individuals endlessly scroll through the public lives of others to maintain their status. Analytics and data professionals believe collecting all the data will solve the problem. All of these reflect backward-looking perspectives that are distractions and ineffective in providing competitive and status advantage. Instead of figuring out who one is, one is endlessly focused on who others are. This results in letting others choose who one is and the decidedly defeatist way of existing. Awareness of one's surroundings allows one to know where the roadblocks are, but it does nothing to create a path for navigating them. Does one step over, around, or smash through them? This is the choice many people and organizations seem ill-equipped to make because they are watching what everyone else is doing instead of making a choice that is true to themselves. The key question for the metamodern analyst is how does one help these people and organizations discover themselves when their perceptions of analytics are all about what others are doing? It may come with unconstrained analysis delivered with sincere irony about what it means to exist. #### Related Items [[The Age of Choice]] [[Choice]] [[Information]] [[Distractions]] [[Decision-making]] [[Progress]] [[Analytics]] [[Metamodernism]]