How often does something pull your attention away from the present? Whether getting lost in thought or scrolling through our phones, distractions define our lives more than our intentions. None of us is immune to the plethora of attention-sucking stimuli in our lives, but we all have the tools necessary to gain some of our agency back.
Remember the Pixar movie WALL-E, where the people were sitting in their floaty chairs, utterly unaware of their surroundings? At one point, WALL-E accidentally bumps into one of the floaty chair people and inadvertently makes her aware of reality. Out from behind her screen, seemingly obvious truths became revelations. “I didn’t know we had a pool.” She said as she noticed the water she had been sitting in front of.
The Connection Between Attention And Value
This post isn’t a commentary on the dormant evils of social media or an analysis of how the news has become more entertainment than information. I’ll save those rants for another day. Instead, I want to consider the connection between attention and value. Big companies know it, but sometimes we’re slow to understand – our attention is invaluable. Why else would companies spend billions of dollars creating campaigns to capture it?
If we’re to avoid our seemingly inevitable future, full of floaty chairs and a dangerous lack of awareness, we will have to reclaim our attention, but not in the ways you might think. Like I said earlier, this isn’t a post about the ails of the attention economy. This is a post about what we can do to enable our free will and intentionally determine where we spend our attention.
Still, I’d be amiss to completely ignore social media or news, but let me only use them as examples. I once believed that reading or watching the news was a moral obligation as an engaged citizen. Staying current on the significant events around the globe felt like a sacred responsibility. In that same vein, keeping tabs on friends through social media can feel like necessary maintenance of our relationships. But if we dig a little deeper, we might discover that things aren’t as they seem.
There’s Only So Much Attention To Go Around
As important as it is to be made aware of the experiences around the globe, there’s only so much our tiny human brains can handle. There’s a point of saturation in which no more good can come from more input. Reading one or two articles per day is far different that falling down the rabbit hole of sensational headline after sensational headline. At some point, we must lift our heads out of the news and recognize that life as we know it is happening right here, right now. Whether we participate or not is our choice. In truth, there’s no better place to become an engaged citizen than in our immediate communities. Spending most of our time and attention in the here and now is enough.
“Imagine if social media closed at 6pm everyday like a shop. We would all be forced to meet up and speak to each other in real life, to be present with our families, to work out, to go outside, to read, to make art, music…”
— Unknown
Now let’s talk about social media. Connection, it turns out, is more valuable when it involves tangible human interaction. Digital communities cannot replace physical ones in terms of benefits. When it comes to maintaining meaningful relationships in our lives, the most effective methods involve skin. I’m not just speaking to the concept of having investment, or “skin in the game,” as they say, but also with actual physical skin. Proximity matters, and when it comes to feelings of loneliness and anxiety, a screen pales in comparison to the value of physical closeness. Social media and news outlets acquire a large swath of our attention because we offer it up willingly.
We Have An Attention Crisis At Play
We choose to spend more time interacting with our screens than with our neighbors. To claim that we have control of our attention is, at best, a hope for a better future. As it stands now, we have something of an attention crisis at play. As disconnected as this may sound, giving up agency over our attention means giving up direction of our values.
We may say we choose to spend hours on social media because we value our relationships, but in truth, the relationship we’re fostering most is the one with our device. We may say we are passionate about social justice and must stay abreast of the news, but the passive nature of watching or reading the news is anything but active. To align our attention with our values is to take a hard look at our behaviors and where we’ve miss stepped.
What The Happiest People Understand
The happiest people I see in the world are those who have taken responsibility for their attention. They dodge attention-grabbing habits and media while also integrate things like self-care and play into their lives so that they can remain balanced and aligned with their values. It’s fine and dandy to say that we value time with loved ones. It’s an entirely different thing to incorporate these priorities into our behaviors and habits.
“When we cut through the chatter of the mind, the things that matter most to us become clear.”
— Andy Puddicombe, co-founder of Headspace
There are few of us, me included, who have mastered our attention, and in truth, acquiring complete control might be missing the point. But it is interesting to consider what the world might look like if we all had a bit more agency when it comes to our attention.
Would it foster more compassion and understanding among individuals? Would the rate of burnout and mental health disorders decrease? Would our creativity go off the charts and solve, once and for all, some of our world’s biggest problems? Perhaps that’s for the mystics and spiritual leaders to know and for us to find out. Regardless it’s evident, now more than ever, that our attention is something worth protecting.
