Attention is a limited resource
so let's stop giving it away
Last week I wrote about “slow” activities and my struggle to avoid spending my entire life in front of a screen. The Google gods must have been listening, because I stumbled upon the book that I’m currently listening to (I know).
The book is called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes. It’s a good listen, and has kept me engaged and thoughtful on traffic-filled car rides and on the treadmill breaks I’m trying to take every hour or so from sitting and working. Oh, modern life!
It’s about what it sounds like it’s about: how, basically, we’ve created a kind of evil infrastructure that holds us constantly rapt and siloed off from one another. While all kinds of new technology has had this effect — the written word, sound transmission and recording, the invention of headphones — special scorn is saved for those companies who purposefully push our evolutionary buttons to make giving attention to what they want us to practically irresistible (I’m looking at you, Meta). I mean, these douchebags have got it down to a formula.
These are things that most of us know, but it does a nice job going from explaining how we get people’s attention (easily) to how we hold people’s attention (not so easy), as well as our inherent psychological need for attention.
And that’s the really heartbreaking truth, to me. We all need and want attention — even those of us who say we don’t. We all want to be seen, heard, and understood. Typically, this happens through deep, interpersonal relationships among us.
But then, along comes something like Facebook. It gives the illusion that we’re getting attention. And we are, sort of. We can even try our best to only get good attention by presenting ourselves in the best light possible.
But the book makes an important distinction between attention and recognition, which is much closer to what we truly want. I mean, I could streak naked through a park and get lots of “attention.” I could, say, write for a paper. But nobody’s going to really know and appreciate me as a person without, well, getting to know me.
But oh, those notifications — “Someone’s talking about you! Someone sent you a message! Someone’s mad at you!” — are hard to resist. And as a result, we’re spending more and more time buried in our phones rather than getting to know the real people around us.
And now here we are, lonely, “connected” in the most isolated way imaginable, and addicted to the junk on our devices as much as we’re addicted to tasty, but ultimately nutritionally valueless junk food.
Might “malicious addiction” be the official phrase of the century so far?
There’s no substitute for forming real, face-to-face relationships. That’s the nutrition we need. But just like it’s easier to order a pizza than cook a nutritious meal, scrolling through a literally never-ending feed is easier than having a tough conversation.
Perhaps remembering that our attention is the product that other people are making lots of money off of will help us to pull ourselves away, at least in fits and spurts. I watch too much Netflix, but I watch it with my partner. I read the news, but then I talk about it with people. I actively try to reject digital attractions that have been made specifically “for me,” to hold my personal attention. Is that enough?
I hope it is. Because like the rest of us, I’ve got precious little left to give.
Excellent essay. The Hayes book sounds right on. I believe that I recommended this once before, but let me mention again Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. It's a remarkable and unsettling book showing how we rewire our brains based on internet usage and unwire our brains for other things like relationships, reading books, writing, managing attention, even thinking. He draws on extensive research but it is highly readable.