| There are various notions of "focus" in academia, many of which are associated with the "positive psychology" school. In sympathy with your observation, I've looked for studies of these phenomena. But I haven't yet seen any study about the difference between "focus" in contexts where the agent has deeply internalized complex skills (e.g. an athlete) versus "focus" in contexts where the agent is expected to deeply internalize seemingly arbitrary routines (e.g. a warehouse fulfillment worker). Needless to say, athletes are much more able to "focus" than warehouse workers. I suspect that it may be statistically significant that, in the athlete's case, their ability to "focus" is deeply related to how emotionally fulfilling their tasks are perceived to be. In other words, we should expect wildly divergent degrees of "ability to focus on work" depending on the type of work we are discussing. To me, this is the crux of the Developer Experience movement: give me meaningful work, and I'll give you inspired/concentrated labor; give me bullshit, fruitless, clickbait concerns, and I'll give you bare minimum effort. |
Put another way, the capacity for human accomplishment in the context of WWII or the Apollo Program boggles the mind somewhat less when you consider how much these projects meant to the people involved.
The meaning vacuum is distorting the culture beyond bullshit jobs, too, as is increasingly visible in people losing themselves in ideology or hatred for The Other. For many, these feel like the most foundational things they have to believe in.