Your Attention Is Sacred.
Trigger warning.
You are going to die.
We all are.
When that final moment comes, your life will have been a collection of everything you paid attention to. Every moment, person, experience, thought, and emotion becomes a small contribution to life’s finality. Yet each of these holds meaning, a cumulation of our values, where we gave our attention.
Are you content with where and to whom you’ve given your attention?
“As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”
― Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
Our attention is the most valuable resource we have. It is finite, and once it is spent there is no way to get it back. It can’t be stored or accrue interest over time.
It can only be given in each moment, either intentionally or unintentionally.
If you can honestly say you have NEVER been sucked into a digital distraction portal (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Tik-Tok) only to come back to consciousness sometime later, wondering where the last 30 minutes to three hours of your life went, then you should stop reading this article.
Congratulations! You have never fallen prey to the ravenous attention economy, meaning you either don’t own a smartphone, or are getting very close to a level of enlightenment the rest of us mere mortals can only dream of.
The Ravenous Attention Economy
In our modern digital world our attention has become a commodity, bought and sold, traded in the attention economy.
The concept of the attention economy is nothing new, it has been outlined many times. I recommend The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu for a historical perspective.
With hungry attention consumption devices in our pockets, always within arms reach, we quickly give away our precious attention to whichever buzzing notification begs us to open the portal of distraction. Each interaction is perfectly designed to keep us looking, reading, scrolling — extracting our attention to be sold to the highest bidder. “Pull-to-refresh” and “double-tap to like” are Pavlovian responses that have been programmed into us without our consent.
Sugar, Shopping, and Cocaine
The foundational principles of addictive design prey on the reward-seeking centers of our brains and the fundamental human need for social belonging.
The concept of variable-reward — for example not knowing just how many 👍🏼 and 🔥 our most recent duckface selfie will receive — is just one of the mechanisms that keep us addicted and coming back for more.
These addictive design features activate dopamine — the same neurotransmitter released in our brains in response to eating sugar, shopping, and doing cocaine.
Pulling Back the Curtain
While the designers and engineers of the attention economy have hidden behind a curtain for years, that era is coming to an end.
Guess what tech companies behind the curtain? WE SEE YOU 👀. And we’re not happy about the way you’ve turned our minds into a resource for extraction.
We’ve had enough.
Thankfully, public awareness of the attention economy and its addictive design principles is growing.
Work being done by Tristan Harris (former Google Design Ethicist) and the folx at the Center for Humane Technology has been instrumental in bringing this issue to the forefront of our collective awareness. The incredible success and popularity of The Social Dilemma (on Netflix) demonstrates that people are waking up to this issue.
Fantastic! 🥳 We have pulled back the curtain and we’re upset about what we’ve found. But now what?
How do we regain agency to choose where and how we give our attention?
Why should we bother to try?
Because…
Your attention is sacred.
I don’t mean to imply any religious connotations by using the word sacred. To be clear, I use the word “sacred” referring to things, actions, or ideas that one imbues with meaning, that which is precious, to which one is respectfully, even reverently, dedicated.
By this definition of sacred, if we want our lives to have meaning, we honor our attention as sacred.
Because our attention isn’t just a resource, it’s our entire life.
We create rituals in our life to honor that which we value as sacred. Rituals of movement as an offering to our health and bodies; cherishing our sacred relationships by calling our family and friends; carefully applying eyeliner as the paint of a warrior.
If we examine our lives, we will find our rituals reflect our values.
In our overwhelmingly digital world, it is easy to find ourselves in a crisis of meaning. University of Toronto Professor John Vervaeke (#professorgoals), describes The Meaning Crisis as a lack of meaning in our existence, leading to disconnectedness and isolation from ourselves and each other.
Creating intentional practices in our daily lives can address the underlying symptoms of both the meaning crisis and the attention economy.
This is an important distinction.
SACRED rituals are those we intentionally imbue with the meaning and reverence, and secular rituals are simply repeated behaviors.
If our sacred rituals are distilled to insignificant repeated behaviors, then we don’t have to give a 💩 about why or what these behaviors are. We don’t have to care if we waste hours a day mindlessly scrolling on our phones, throwing our attention into the distraction matrix.
One of the dangers of the attention economy — and the addictive design principles underlying its creation — is that we find ourselves engaging in repeated behaviors we didn’t choose for ourselves; compulsively checking our phones, taking curated photos solely for social media posts, obsessively viewing our favorite news outlets for our next dose of outrage.
If we’re fed up with puppet-masters pulling the dopamine strings of our minds, then perhaps it is time to make the choice to honor our attention as sacred.
How can we make the choice to move from distraction to intention?
Organizations like The Center for Human Technology provide a variety of useful actions to push back against the attention economy — turn off your notifications, remove toxic apps (like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok), eliminate outrage from your media diet, keep your phone outside your bedroom. All of these will certainly help eliminate technological distraction, but the attention economy is a well-oiled machine.
If we restructure our lives and devices to remove one source of distraction, another will very likely creep in to take its place and pull our attention back into its churning engine.
Forever freeing our minds from the pull of the attention economy requires developing rituals of attention — practices that increase our agency, intentionality, and capacity to choose where and to whom we give our attention.
Developing a meditation practice is one such ritual of attention.
In the West, meditation often refers to the practice of focusing your attention non-judgmentally on the present moment, breath, or other point of focus. Meditation and mindfulness are increasingly trendy words that are used as blanket terms for a variety of different specific practices: focusing your attention on the breath, cultivating loving-kindness or gratitude, focusing on sensations in the body, or observing the fine details in your immediate surroundings, etc. The list of specific practices has something for everyone.
Are you ready to take the first step to move from distraction to intention?
Flexing the brain muscle of focusing your attention is challenging at first, so start small and be gentle with yourself. If you choose a specific, simple ritual, even 5–10 minutes, and practice consistently, you will observe as your reactivity and stress decrease while your ability to direct your locus of attention grows.
The attention economy is not our friend; it wants to capsize our individuality and purpose. Each of us has the power to reignite the value of meaning in our lives through our intentions and practices. The individual transformation toward intentionality will result in a cultural shift that collectively pulls us away from those who seek to use or manipulate us.
Choosing meaning above convention, replacing distraction with intention, and adopting originality over obedience will propel us toward the individual sovereignty we crave.
Are you proud of where and to whom you’ve given your attention?
And, will you dedicate yourself to rituals that truly reflect your values?
You have the power to direct your attention toward any adventure of life; beauty in the mundane, gratitude for the simple, love for the moment.
Just make sure you are living the adventure you choose.
May we all leave this world satisfied with each chapter of our lives, thoughtfully composed with the attention we hold sacred.
