When the Straight reaches him at his home in Richmond, Virginia, Matthew B. Crawford has just abandoned an old truck on a quiet road nearby. He’s been working on it for a while and it’s stalled out again, so this is a good time for an interview. The motor has to cool anyway before he can take another look.

It’s a weirdly well-timed example of the kind of problem that can save your soul, according to Crawford’s challenging and often inspiring new book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. It’s a stubborn, crooked, tactile problem, demanding deep patience and years of focused experience to solve.

By contrast, he argues, our culture is increasingly infatuated with an ideal of tidy, seamless interaction with reality, where obstacles to desire vanish with the right app, and identity is expressed in the choice of what to consume. We are striving—dangerously, he claims—for a delusional state in which ordinary life is frictionless.

“What it means to be frictionless is that it doesn’t require any skilled engagement on your part, and so we then become dependent on whatever it is that’s filling the role previously built by skill,” explains Crawford, who gained renown in 2009 for Shop Class as Soulcraft, his best-selling inquiry into the meaning of manual work.

In the utopia envisioned by Silicon Valley and corporate advertisers, he says, “freedom is manifest as satisfying your preferences—if you’re able to do that, then you’re free. This is the language of economics: to discover your true preferences requires maximizing the number of choices you face, so you can pick just the right thing for you. But, of course, having all these choices is the condition that makes for maximum dissipation of your energies, and distraction.”

Exhaustion and distraction are things we hear a lot about now, particularly in editorials and think pieces on the stress of juggling text messages, email, and social-media feeds. But information technologies themselves aren’t the problem, in Crawford’s view. Their hold on us is in fact the twisted outcome of a certain old image of what it means to be fully human.

As The World Beyond Your Head recounts, 17th- and 18th-century liberal thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant insisted that becoming an autonomous individual meant severing yourself from external influence—the dictates of rulers, the opinions of others, even bodily perceptions. This idea had deeply worthy political goals at the time, Crawford notes, but we’ve since turned it into a kind of cultural fetish that declares you must avoid “anything that impinges on you that compromises the freedom of your will—anything that’s influencing you,” as he puts it to the Straight.

The result is a profound form of isolation in which “you’re radically responsible for yourself,” even as you’re surrounded by seemingly infinite choices. In one chapter of the book, Crawford suggests this as a source of the epidemic of depression that has spread in recent decades—a “weariness,” he writes, “with the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self”.

What has been allowed to disappear from this reality, and what can be cultivated and restored, are “ecologies of attention”, to use Crawford’s term. In these, you place yourself up against “the brute alien otherness of the real” by immersing yourself in a highly skilled pursuit—one where your options are limited and shaped by what the world gives you, and where your response is tuned by intense practice. His examples are as various as a short-order cook working in full flight, a hockey player moving through the maelstrom of a game, a jazz musician trading phrases, and a glass blower finessing a piece at a crucially heated moment.

“What I mean is just that your perception of the world is organized and even reorganized by the affordances for action that exist in a particular niche,” he explains. “So if you’re a martial artist, you see the way an opponent is standing as affording certain strikes and foreclosing others. It’s just that the kind of animal you are, the kind of niche of action you inhabit, really influences what you see. And when you’re in a practice that demands your skilled engagement, what you see gets very narrowed in a way that gathers your mental energies to a point. And when that goes really well, I find it’s like time almost seems to dilate and gets kind of weird and becomes something to savour—it’s pleasurable. That’s the opposite experience of being bored and anxious and taking whatever the most intense entertainment that’s offered to you is because it doesn’t demand anything of you.”

Of course, doing this means ignoring some of the most cherished principles preached today. It means recognizing the mysterious and obstinate nature of the world. It requires voluntarily limiting your options and, in many cases, submitting to the authority of teachers in order to begin learning your craft. But, Crawford says, it can offer a richer kind of personal freedom than wandering the endless, distraction-fogged maze of virtual, manufactured experience.

“We’re often told, ‘Well, just be disciplined, regulate yourself, turn off your screens, and don’t submit yourself to so many choices,’ ” he explains, before heading off to take another shot at that stalled truck. “But the problem is that self-regulation is like a muscle, and it’s one that’s easily exhausted—you can’t do it all day, every day. And so I think the more promising strategy, rather than just trying to be more disciplined, is to become absorbed in some worthy object that demands your skilled engagement. Once you get that under way and start to develop competence, I think that burden of self-regulation is greatly reduced, because it’s more like love—it’s like you’re getting pulled into something based on its own merits. So it’s not like you’re having to constantly exclude all the other things, because they almost disappear.”