Chess, Attention and Modern Life
The funny thing about chess is that forty-five minutes can disappear without you noticing. Your phone stops existing. Dinner can wait. You forget what you were worried about that morning because, for a while, your entire world is just sixty-four squares.
It is total absorption into something other than yourself. A kind of meditation. Not because you’re calm, but because your attention has nowhere else to go.
There aren’t many things left that demand that of us.
In this day and age, we are increasingly outsourcing our thinking. Sat navs choose our routes. Spotify chooses our music. Algorithms decide what we see, and when we see it. AI finishes our sentences before we’ve even decided what we wanted to say. Chess refuses to outsource anything. No one can make the next move except you.
Luck barely exists in chess. It is one of the fairest games there is. It all comes down to the work each player has put into their craft, their concentration, and their ability to see a little further ahead. Life gives us different starting positions, but chess gives everyone the same rules.
Perhaps that’s why chess survives everywhere. In schools. Cafés. Parks. Prisons. Wherever people are stripped back to the essentials, the game remains. Because, for a little while, your next decision still belongs to you.
Chess also forces you to sit with discomfort. You can’t rush because you’re impatient, and you can’t blame anyone else when things begin to unravel. How many games are lost because someone resigns too early? Or because they panic after one mistake? In chess, almost everything comes down to a poor move, a poor calculation, or simply failing to see what was there all along.
Have you ever lost a game and stared at the board afterwards, trying to work out where it all went wrong, only to realise you actually lost it twenty moves before checkmate?
Life rarely changes in one dramatic moment either. More often, it changes because of a hundred small decisions we barely noticed ourselves making.
Ray Charles, playing chess, 1966