Attention – a concentration of the mind on a single object or thought, especially one preferentially selected from a complex, with a view to limiting or clarifying receptivity by narrowing the range of stimuli.
The Bottom Line Up Front
*The practice of paying attention to a singular task, activity or person isn’t just a scarce economical resource, it’s a hidden treasure trove of joy that we can all tap into.*
Humor me and try the following exercise to exemplify my first point – that paying attention to a single entity feels good. Put your headphones on. Play your favorite song. Don’t do anything else. Just listen. Pay attention to each instrument, the underlying beat, the melodies and solos on top. Then pull your headphones down and press the ear pad to your cheek and lips. Feel the softness, the slight cold, the wrinkles in the material if you’ve had them for a while.
The next exercise is for the next meeting or lecture you attend. Many can feel very boring. But try paying attention. No Slack, email or sneaky multitasking work. I hope that it will feel less boring and more engaging, even if you are just engaged by things you’re not supposed to be, like someone’s nervous tic or the tone of their voice or the different power dynamics between, and roles played by, those in attendence.
The emotions of paying attention follow a trajectory. It starts with an agitation, a wading through mental mud as you try to settle your brain and converge your focus onto a single entity. If we persevere, this ‘squirrel brain’ state simmers down as we settle into the grounded state of attentiveness. The squirrel has not fled, they will come back periodically, but they are not dominating our thoughts anymore. This grounding is aided by good sleep and a device-free environment.
But most of us do not operate in an environment that is conducive to good sleep or that is device-free. Rather, an amalgamation of environmental conditions conspire against our in our efforts to pay attention. There’s the phone-scrolling: TikTok, Instagram, all messaging apps (yes, even texting), the urge to quench every question that comes to mind with a compulsive Google search, tracking your stock value, checking in on work tasks you can’t do anything about on Slack or email at the weekend. Then there’s the Type A compulsion towards busyness: it feels uneasy to just sit and contemplate what you want to write about in your blog post rather than just frantically type words, for example. On a similar not, there’s the Type A compulsion towards productivity: it’s hard to just sit and read a book when a part of you thinks you should be doing something more ‘productive’.
The challenges we face in our quest to pay attention, should we choose to pursue it in spite of the uphill battle, bring me to my second point – the capacity to pay attention is a prized and increasingly rare skill for anyone striving to create valuable output. Very few people are willing to accept this quest and persevere with the renunciation of distractions to be more attentive. As a direct consequence, very few people are operating anywhere their full potential to do their best work, be that art, engineering, activism etc. If you can pay attention, whatever your area of paid or unpaid work is, you have a superhuman edge.
The Call to Action
In this digital age of on-tap, easy amusement, we are like alcoholics with a never-emptying bottle of liquor glued to our hands. Despite this, I believe that there is a case for developing luddite tendencies for the practicing attentiveness. This may require some measures that would now be considered extreme, such as leaving your phone on Do Not Disturb by default, not taking it to work, not having it on your person but rather leaving it plugged in like an old-school landline, checking messages at only one or two predetermined times a day, etc.
But friends, there is a plethora of joy and creative output on the other side of this effort. I am willing to pay the cost of missed Insta stories to get there.
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