Writing for BBC News, Damon Young warns against seeing distraction as a modern problem:

Over a century ago, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described his
harassed peers. "One thinks with a watch in one's hand," he wrote in
1887, "even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news
of the stock market".

Yet Nietzsche didn't blame clocks or
markets. "We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly
than is necessary to sustain our life," he wrote in his Untimely
Meditations, "because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to
stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from
himself."

In other words, the technologies were certainly aiding
distractions – but they weren't providing the urge. This, said
Nietzsche, was human, all-too-human.

Centuries earlier,
philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal put this very succinctly.
"The sole cause of man's unhappiness," he wrote, "is that he does not
know how to stay quietly in his room."

For Pascal, like Nietzsche, man was a restless, jittery creature, always looking for distractions from life…. At distraction's heart aren't silicon chips, but an unwillingness to
confront very human issues: pain, boredom, anxiety. Distraction
certainly has neurophysiological underpinnings – physical bottlenecks of
sense, response and cognition. But these often work because we allow
ourselves to be managed by machines' rhythms and logic.