Attention is a Super Power
And we are giving ours away for nothing in return
Have a look around. Seriously, have a look.
You’ll see it everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you live in a red state or blue state, if you live in the U.S. or overseas, city or country, cottage or skyscraper. One thing you’ll notice is that everyone is on their phones.
You see it in cars. The light will turn green, but the car in front of you stays put. The driver was on their phone. Walking on the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change? On their phone. Waiting for the laundry to dry? On their phone. “Watching” TV? Also on their phone. Doing their private business in the loo, on the phone.
TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, BlueSky… it doesn’t matter.
A time-traveler thrust here from twenty years ago would notice a stark change in everyone, young and old. Like zombies, we’re plugged into our devices all the time. Barely an idle moment goes by before we pull out our phones. We don’t need the Borg to assimilate us with nanobots and tech implants. We assimilate ourselves. We plug into the hive mind while tuning out from the world because it feels good to let go.
How many times have you pulled out your phone to check the time, only to end up scrolling social media or some news feed and only to remember, ten or fifty minutes later that you just wanted to know the time?
I do it too. I’m not immune from phone addiction. But lately I’ve been trying to intentionally put away my phone, to look up, to look around. Once in a while, I see another fellow traveler, a soul like me not bound to an electronic device, but awake, aware, to that which is going on around them. We meet eyes. There is no knowing nod, but there is a knowing. We are both present while others are elsewhere, elsewhen.
Or I see someone not on their phone, not endlessly scrolling, but reading a book, and to me they are heroes, great warriors in the battle for attention. They fight and win not by waging bloody wars, but by refusing to give attention to the mind-leeching slugs, the social media companies who feast on our minds for profit.
Recently I was walking with my wife in Central Park, in New York City, and I overheard a woman say, “I see all these beautiful places I want to visit on TikTok, but then after I can never remember any of them.”
There’s good reason for this. When you’re scrolling social media you’re not really there, not in Paris, or London, or Dubai, or Caracas, or Lahore. You are not even present in yourself, in the moment. You are a savannah animal, foraging in the grass for morsels to eat, except the morsels you encounter have no real sustenance. They give you a brief hit of dopamine before they vanish, and you are left with a vague empty feeling you cannot abide. And so to fill this nagging emptiness you keep scrolling, keep foraging, for that next empty morsel, which satiates you for half a moment before it vanishes again, and you must forage for more empty meals.
Meanwhile your attention is robbed, your time is sucked, and a vague sense of emptiness grows with every swipe of your thumb.
Social media will never sate you. Its job is to keep you forever hungry.
So put down that damn phone. Uninstall your social media apps. Look up. Look around. There’s a world out there. It doesn’t care if you like it or not, or how much time you spend with it. It’s not trying to sell you anything. It’s not trying to manipulate you politically or run social experiments without your knowledge. It’s not hiding information from you and it’s not trying to deceive you.
Take back your attention from those who want to rob it from you for their own ends.
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Good reminder :) :)
I was in the d'Orsay Museum in Paris recently and in the room with all the hits (Starry Night, etc). Many visitors only experience these famous paintings through their camera phone app. Absolute madness. We can access millions of photos of these paintings online, but in the moment of actually experiencing the real thing, we dip back into documentation, so we have evidence that we've seen the thing, though we didn't actually see the thing, and we probably won't even review the evidence.
These impressionist paintings were a form of artistic documentation at the time, and contemporary humans saw a representation of a real place, but enhanced and distorted through the artist's vision of it - an augmented reality. We've metafied this original effect and diluted it into almost nothing. Funny how our complex technology destroyed this simpler one that achieves a much greater impact.
Thanks for making me think and process this experience!
This is why I write on a typewriter, and use a hard copy dictionary.