Attention and Distraction
“It seemed like there was one deeper level of ‘distraction’ to contend with: the sort of distraction that would threaten our ability to know and define what our goals and values are in the first place.”
“If you don’t write down your goals, you’ll end up working for someone who does.”
I recently heard this quote from a self-help channel. It’s true that much of self-help can be inflated and romantic, after all, part of its purpose is to inspire and motivate. Despite this, the intentionality at the heart of this quote rings true. If you aren’t paddling in the stream, you’re at the mercy of the current. Today I'd like to talk about a new current, an especially strong one, and how we can paddle to get to where we want to go.
In the new age, the age of attention, corporations are competing for your awareness. Lavish financial spoils await successful competitors like Facebook, Twitter, and Tik Tok. Previously there was television and radio advertisements that could easily be unplugged. Now we face a more integrated attention apparatus. Our phones hold hundreds of apps that all have a ravenous desire for our attention. Further, all of them understand one crucial fact; our attention is most easily captured and secured while our minds are busy and full, rather than empty and calm. Contentedness needs no content. It is our grasping minds, filled with desire and a glowing appetite for escapism that are sought and cultivated by these platforms. Attention and distraction are what this piece is all about.
Upon waking up, from absence to presence, I’ve been frightened. I’ve looked beside me and seen a paddle that has lay by my side for longer than I care to admit. I’ve been distracted. Too submerged in my day-to-day existence to sit, look ahead and wonder what might be around the bend. In modern life, we can easily loose grip on the romantic (and indispensable) idea that our lives are ours to make.
When thinking about personal development and fulfilment, an overflowing mind is not fertile ground. Your familial, career, personal and health prospects are all at risk by the apparatus of corporate attention acquisition. Though some people's lifestyles are close to ideal for full-blown techno-luddite extremism, I realise that we need to be pragmatic here. Unfortunately, for most of us, unplugging is not an option. Gmail for work, Spotify for the commute, and Instagram to keep in touch with friends overseas. If getting back onto dry land isn’t possible and the attention-stream has a will of its own, what do we do? Step one: cultivate enough attention to know where we’d like to go.
"It seemed like there was one deeper level of ‘distraction’ to contend with: the sort of distraction that would threaten our ability to know and define what our goals and values are in the first place."
James Williams
The discordant, hollow and sweet hurricane of superficial junk distracts us from the present moment. Distraction endangers our ability to know and define what our shifting goals and values are. We must search for them. They rarely reveal themselves to us at the best of times, and they certainly don’t reveal themselves while we’re scrolling on Tik Tok or searching the lounge room for our vape. Regaining a relationship with the present moment is a method of reviving a relationship with oneself. Shaking hands with yourself, as you are, in the present, is the foundation of lived coherence with ones values. We’ll go deeper into attention and presence a bit later. First though, let’s quickly carve up goals and values to assemble a clearer approach.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is going to serve as our guide. The lower level needs; physiological and safety needs can usually be accomplished while paying little attention. Most of us can, while lost in thought about a project at work, complete a rental application, lock our doors and windows, browse supermarket isles and the like. The higher levels require more attention and are therefore more under threat by the corporate attention wars and worthy of more discussion.
Esteem needs include the need for confidence, achievement, respect of and by others. Self-actualisation, the tip of the hierarchy, includes the need for morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts. These higher order needs are by no means automatic, they require habitual and attentive engagement in order to be cultivated. Maslow describes self-actualisation as becoming “everything you are capable of becoming”. We need to know who we are. We need to have a vision of who we can be. This requires attention, but a specific kind. What kind of attention? Enter: Simone Weil.
Weil speaks of a similar developmental land of milk and honey to Maslow when she writes about entry to the “kingdom of truth reserved for genius” which she believed could be accessed by anyone given that he “longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention on its attainment”. Ambitious? Yes. Compatible with scrolling memes on instagram? No. What is the kingdom of truth? For Weil it includes beauty, virtue and “every kind of goodness” and can be accessed through attention and the heart’s longing. This is a spiritual pursuit, not simply an intellectual one. Weil exalts attention and distinguishes it from other, more established definitions of the word. “Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort” she writes. Rather, attention is a “negative effort” which consists of suspending out thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated” by the object of our attention, whether that object be physical or mental, external or internal. Preferable to focussing, which might comprise holding a lot of our useful prior knowledge, she believes attention will have us seeing clearer and with empty and eager minds. This emptiness could be the antithesis of the grasping, loud and persistent minds promoted by the corporate competitors we spoke of earlier. Weil’s attention is analogous to some forms of meditation or even flow states, as first developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Proper engagement with reality is to look up and see where the stream is taking you. Once you do that, the freedom to paddle becomes available. In ignorance, everything is dark.
Zhuangzi, in his seminal Taoist text from the third century BCE, writes of Qing, a woodworker who is said to have carved a bell stand so exquisite that people said it must be the work of spirits. When asked of his method, Qing replied that he fasts for 7 days before starting work. After a few days, thoughts of money or fame have left him. After 5 days, thoughts of praise and blame have left him. After 7 days, he thinks no longer of the ruler, the courts or even his own body. It is then that he ventures into the mountain forests and waits until a bell stand reveals itself from within one of the trees. If it does, he puts his hands to work. If it doesn't then he lets it go. Emptiness creates the space required for morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts to occur. None of these arise by thought patterns, by fullness and busyness. Rather, it is stillness and silence of the mind that allows the space for them to be called into being.
Hopefully by now my sweet readers are in; convinced of the value of attention and it’s still and empty mental nature, displeased with the state of the corporate competitors and their fight to divert our attention. But what then do we do; in our actual lives?
We can acknowledge and face the currents we are surrounded by. We can ditch the platforms that take more than they give. We can set windows in our schedule to limit usage to a level we deem healthy. We can exercise our bodies to help clear and slow down our minds. We can meditate. Meditation is attention stripped to its essence. It is training where we empty our minds and get reintroduced to ourselves. Just ten minutes a day gives us a chance to observe what our minds are up to, what it repeatedly throws into our awareness, what excites and scares us, what we long for and value most. Watching the mind reveals itself to us. It strengthens our defences against the inevitable distractions of modern life, the same distractions that threaten “our ability to know and define what our goals and values are in the first place.” Once we set our sights on knowing ourselves and paddling towards truth, beauty and goodness of all sorts, Weil says we cannot be disappointed.
“When one hungers for bread, one does not receive stones.”
Simone Weil
W.
