We have a deficit. It’s scattered and short-spanned. We are unable to pay it. Attention is scarce.

When it comes to commentary on this shortage, however, we face an embarrassment of riches. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus states that we are being robbed of it by corporations and other invasive “forces.” Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism recommends that we take matters into our own hands: a digital declutter for one month. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing instructs us in the fact that just noticing the world in non-productive ways is an act of protest against the commodification of, you know, everything. Joshua Cohen’s Attention says that attention is an empty concept that creates artificial scarcity in order to make us feel bad for ourselves. Novels like Sam Lipsyte’s Hark and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This ironize our predicament to the nth degree. Our attention to the problems of attention from all these angles is subtle, varied, and wide-ranging.

But I’ve become skeptical that all this attention talk is doing us much good. It’s not just that the internet is a technology for not paying—for not even wanting to pay—attention. Nor is it that we all already know everything there is to be said about this subject—so that our interest in attention becomes another way we divert ourselves. It’s that the ways in which we are asked to pay attention are themselves part of the problem to which they are supposedly solutions. Something about our understanding of attention feeds us right back into the loop of the technologies that are supposedly extracting it from us.

Part of the problem is that our ordinary understanding of attention is a cocktail of elements stemming from two incongruous sources: ancient spiritual practices and modern experimental psychology. I’d first like to sketch a picture of how this cocktail got mixed up, before suggesting how we should rethink coming to attention. 

Attention can be a number of different things: a measure of success, a commercial resource, a psychological process, a working focus, even a capacity for love. At its origin, however, the notion of “attention” arose with the great inward turn of the Western psyche: a widespread internalizing of responsibility and culpability that gradually got underway in the second or third centuries BC. It was as a consequence of this turn that the “will” was first formulated as an independent faculty of volition; that one’s private intentions came to be understood as a source of guilt on a par with the commission of actual prohibited deeds; and that internal desires and attitudes as such came under intensified moral scrutiny. Hannah Arendt notes that it was in this period that the idea that one could remain free in mind while physically in chains first emerged—a conception that would have struck Aristotle as nonsensical.

The Greek noun for attention—prosoche—is first attested in the work of Chrysippus, a Greek Stoic from the third century BC. The word literally means “grasping toward” or “being intent on.” This was loaned into Latin as ad+tendo, where tendo means “stretch” or “tense,” itself a verb associated with archery. Attending—or attentio animi, as the phrase occurs in Cicero—literally meant “stretching one’s mind toward.”

One of Stoicism’s (as well as Epicureanism’s) moral innovations was to put having the right sorts of thoughts and emotional responses—and eliminating the wrong ones—at the center of the quest for happiness. We would now call this “mindfulness” and talk about detaching from our triggers. Attention became a central element of Stoicism’s spiritual exercises. It is a constant vigilance of mind that allows the philosopher to discern what is up to him and what is not, as well as to free himself from unruly passions by concentrating only on the now. The right habits of attention can make suffering bearable and life manageable. 

This inward turn was further developed by and through Christianity, which reconceived faith as a matter of inner assent. Traditional and pagan religions were not a matter of “belief” at all, or at any rate not as we would understand it. They consisted in the communal observance and performance of prescribed ritual practices. Christianity, by contrast, makes you accountable to God’s judgment alone, whatever your external circumstances. Jesus’ recurring teaching that the words need to be quickened by the right spirit might be understood as injunctions to pay a special sort of attention, as might his presentation of the first “great” commandment and his repeated reminders to stay awake against the day of his return. 

Beginning around the third or fourth century AD, the term “attention” was explicitly developed as a spiritual technology of Christian monasticism. For ascetics and the desert fathers, attention is intrinsic to the experience of prayer. Like St. Nilus of Sinai and St. Anthony the Great, Origen writes that what you pay attention to can defile or purify you. St. Isaac of Syria writes that the attention of the saints “is on the Father’s bosom, and at every moment hope itself directs their vision, as with a pointing finger, towards the distant goal, invisible, yet seen by the hidden eyes of faith, while desire for this distant goal sets aflame all parts of their souls like a fire.” In other words, attention is the realm within which you must vie for your salvation against the demons of distracting sensuality. 

To actually attend, in this tradition, is not just to perceive, but to be absorbed by (and into) what you are attending to and how you are attending to it. One might say that the monastery was the first attention platform, the first setting in which attention and its disciplines were a central and explicit issue—and not only in the day’s large blocks of activity, but in the cracks and breaks between them as well. For this reason, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has compared the smartphone to the rosary.

To the extent that attention is now everybody’s business—not just the philosopher’s or monk’s—we can understand this process as part of the continuing expansion of spiritual concerns beyond the scope of a monastic elite. Just as Max Weber suggested that the Reformation expanded the demands of asceticism beyond the monastery walls, so we are now all called to be ascetics accountable for our own field of thinking. 

Attention is like time: it’s tempting to believe that it has always been there regardless of our noticing, but it is in fact shaped by and inseparable from our means of counting it. In some loose sense, attention has of course always mattered, even outside of spiritual practices—as part of the pursuit of glory, influence, or renown, say. But it is because we have today found a way of treating something fundamentally intangible—the stream of consciousness—as fungible into other kinds of goods (like money or data) that it has become an object charged with public concern. Attention to attention has been intensified through—and, in a sense, created by—new capacities, desires, and metaphors to measure it. Our current understanding of attention constitutes the refiguring of the older spiritual traditions I’ve noted within the terms of modern technologies of quantification (and the incentives to employ them).

In his book Suspensions of Perception, Jonathan Crary writes that it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that attention took up a dominant role within philosophy, psychology, and economics. It came into focus as “a problem whose centrality was directly related to the emergence of a social, urban, psychic, and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input.” I would add that it came about as a nexus of several developments: the acceleration of mass forms of social exchange (the pushing, triggering, and switching made possible by electrification, in particular); the appearance of information as an object to be studied in its own right; an increased management of ambient, sensory environments (streets, factory floors, shop windows); and the decontextualization of experience into episodic set pieces. 

It is in this light of shifts in environments and consumption that attention became a new problem for the disciplines of production, a new asset for advertising, and an essential part of the new field of experimental psychology. Regard for attention as a commercial resource developed side by side with the work of French sociologists of mass dynamics like Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon, while Wilhelm Wundt, Ernst Mach, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William James accorded attention a paradigmatic place within their research into psychic activity. 

Needless to say, digital technology confronts us with levels of sensory input that make late–nineteenth century Paris look like Sleepy Hollow. It purports to be able to micromanage every attentional act—to the degree that our field of attention becomes identified with our screens. The term has, as a result, become even more ubiquitous and fraught over the past twenty years. 

Meanwhile, the minute, massive, and aggregate character of data analysis is without precedent. Google (to take one well-known example) claims to have made an additional $200 million dollars in 2014 solely by having tuned its advertising links to precisely the right shade of blue. And the ballooning of information from all quarters has itself made attention all the more valuable. We are tasked with consuming so much information that information has become all-consuming. Attention is now, almost by definition, that activity whereby the time of our lives is translated into information and information into money. 

This new discourse around attention also involves us in certain fictions about what it is we are talking about. It implies a specific view of time as a series of discontinuous snapshots or moments, each of which is under our control. Our fragmented sensory experience during these packets of time is reified into data. Meanwhile, our experience of time is severed from the past and future and exiled into a kind of eternal present. In his Confessions, St. Augustine identifies attention with our experience of the present, but he describes this attention as structured in relation to our future hopes and past memories. When we speak of “attention” today, however, it is an experience of a technological now that saturates our field of vision. Our rapt interest in today’s matters overwhelms our memory of what mattered yesterday or our view of some more distant future. Time (like information itself) does not add up or cohere into anything.

With its unholy mixture of spiritual and commercial roots, this reified concept of attention—the very basis of the tech industry—is then sold back to us within a particular self-image. What’s appealing about attention is the presumption that we are in possession of some precious resource just by being ourselves. The mere act of attending is supposedly valuable, creative, and essential to who we are. We are encouraged to feel we’re engaging with some ultimate sense of purpose just by noticing the hereness and nowness of the world. 

In other words, attention has become a quasi-sacred activity that one can safely bring up to discuss matters of meaning in a secular, materialist age—without any of the awkward baggage of revealed religions. Like “mindfulness,” yoga, and meditation, attention is at once rooted in venerable ascetic traditions while also available on demand for corporate retreats, branding ventures, and wellness suites. It is, for this reason, a cornerstone of what might loosely be called our dominant technological ideology. 

Google even has its own mindfulness program to help us pay attention, which offers us Words of Ancient Wisdom rebooted into the interests of modern productivity:

Mindfulness isn’t just sitting on the floor, legs crossed, and chanting mantras. It’s a tool that, when used wisely, can boost your experience at work, your relationships with others and even your overall well-being. Mindfulness is maintaining a moment-to-moment awareness of your thoughts, feelings and emotions, while having an attitude of kindness and curiosity.

This is like listening to one’s drug dealer preach the virtue of sobriety. It’s a good example of something the industrial economy first destroys and then re-consecrates in order to sell it back to us at a markup. Google’s program shows that constantly thinking about one’s attention is completely in keeping with an information environment in which inattention is the norm. Attention talk has become the therapeutic grease that helps the Big Tech machine run smoothly. 

It would be neither possible nor desirable for us to discard the concept of attention. It is central to our self-understanding as users of technology and as agents in a modern, urban environment. If it did not exist, we would have to invent it. (As an analogy, try not using the word “interesting” for a day—it’s nearly impossible. Yet somehow people managed without it until the eighteenth century.) But it’s in our power to see the ways in which our typical understanding of attention actually self-sabotages our efforts to cultivate it. I suggest that we begin by reconsidering the following four assumptions about attention.

First, the idea that our attention is up to us and consists of punctual snapshots of time. I mean the assumption that I may pay attention for ten seconds here or there by, as it were, squinting intently at things; that I can open up my meditation app for half an hour in order to optimize my spiritual life; that my clicks record or express “votes” of attention. So far from showing that we are in control, these attentional acts show the opposite—all of them originate from, are managed by, and are in service to digital incentives. 

Instead, we might try to reconceive attention not as a moment or as a product of a momentary decision but as a rhythm inhering within a pattern of life. The correct unit of attention is not a click or swipe or the length of a video, but the culture of a whole place or environment. If you drive to work or ride the subway in a busy city, your attention is trained to the tempo of the stimuli that solicit your responses. There is a reason why monasteries are situated on mountain tops and not in Times Square, why the Dalai Lama tends to avoid Berlin night clubs. It is a convenient lie (or a half-truth) that our attention is up to us: a lie whereby screens can continue to pollute our information environment even as we presume that we alone are responsible for what we pay attention to. Our attention is embedded within our social organization writ large. It is therefore an inescapably political subject.

Second, the idea that one can or should discuss the goal of paying attention as such—as a neutral act independent of its particular objects. (This is what makes it a nice subject for the pap of commencement addresses like David Foster Wallace’s This is Water.) Concerted attention is without a doubt a transformative capacity; but the transformation can just as easily be for ill. A silly example: I once watched all the James Bond movies on consecutive nights, in order to acquaint myself with an Important Cultural Touchstone. Despite the highly ironic critical distance I consciously adopted toward them throughout, I subsequently saw that I had been a little degraded by the whole thing. The shape of my affective responses—toward sexy strangers, say—was retrained toward the Bond aesthetic to a degree that became obvious (which is not to say I succeeded at embodying it). Brainwashing is possible: you can destroy a human being’s capacity to think and feel straight by means of exposure and repetition. Advertising and propaganda really do work. 

I would add, however, that they work only by destroying our capacity for attention—by beating into us the easy equation of what is most familiar with what is true. What actually deepens our capacity for attention must repay it as few human works do, and those only with immense and sustained effort on our part. Because we are changed by (and into) what we habitually mind, we should strain every nerve to think and feel and see and hear only what’s true, noble, just, pure, and lovely—in sum, what’s worthy of attention. This is the point of a canon of best works. The question of what we should attend to is the question of what a human being should be. Attention is therefore an inescapably pedagogical subject.

Third, we should reconsider the idea that attention is just a psychological act, a way of opening our brain and eyes to input. This conception makes attention appealing for people who sit at desks for a living, involved in discrete cognitive tasks—people for whom thinking is detached from physical activity and for whom experience consists in “processing information.” In other words, people who work like the computers they work with.

But anything that can be characterized in terms of “information” isn’t rich enough to be fully human. Information suggests low-resolution or incomplete experience. Attention has become a problem for us not simply because we lead our busy lives, but because we spend a sizeable amount of those lives sorting through data that’s not worth a second look. Being good users requires us to skim, scan, multi-task, and take in what’s essential at a glance. Inattention is a kind of digital virtue, because we are tasked with dealing with more than we can manage and with less than deserves our full attention. No one who devotes close attention to each email, news alert, update, or notification is doing it right.

Still, much of our access to other people now takes place in the form of digital information. Our experience of others is closely identified with the information we encounter from and about them—many of our relationships consist of little else. The low-level attention and information processing involved in these relationships is thus inherently depersonalizing and dehumanizing. That is, where the experience of others becomes “content” and where words are not (and cannot be) considered with patience, our respect toward persons is degraded. Attention is not only something we do, but something we do to others. It is therefore an inescapably ethical subject.

Finally, we should question the notion that attention is a limited resource clocked by the measurable time of your life. The twentieth century’s two best thinkers on the subject of attention—Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch—offer a view of it as a task disclosive of what lies before us. “Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality,” writes Murdoch. Attention cannot be measured by a timepiece; rather, it is a source of psychic energy that, at its limit best, can put us in contact with the transcendent good. It is the capacity whereby being totally engaged and totally receptive coincide in us, or whereby we become what we know—the passion of communion achieved. 

Attention bespeaks our porousness. It is the psychic activity whereby we digest our experience and transform ourselves into what we care to dwell on, as well as the work whereby our outer experience is sounded and invested with our premonitions of things unseen—so the world becomes us, come to life. It at once exhibits the world and transforms our very self. The point of cultivating one’s attention is therefore to have access to a source of attention that’s inexhaustible and therefore precisely not finite. “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” Weil writes. That is, it is in unmixed attention that we can (even if only briefly and by fugitive flickers) transcend the opacity of our natural, self-centered view. Evil is only half attending. Attention is, in this way, an inescapably religious subject. 

How should we be attending, then? We should, for one thing, work to sever the two roots of attention—spiritual and psychological—as I’ve tried to present them above. So long as they are combined into a single sense, we will and must continue to fail to attend. Yet it is this chronic failure that, counterintuitively, proves to be perhaps the single most intoxicating element of our digital cocktail. 

Let me try to explain by way of my own struggles with attention. They are conditioned by a particular image of the kind of attention I wish I could be paying and that I think is required of me. I envision myself in a state of maximum control: taut, alert, deliberate, and single-mindedly on track. Occasionally and in snatches, I am able to approximate this condition. Perhaps, with the help of stronger stimulants than caffeine, I could approximate it for longer stretches—yet these have undeniable downsides (such as jail time). 

But what mainly happens is this. I stare at the screen for a moment; I peck out a sentence or two; I am dismayed that it looks kind of stupid or wrong; I check the clock; I change the song; I look at the game’s score; I respond to a text; I scan the headlines; I look up a tangential reference; and I return to the task at hand several minutes later with a sense of renewed anxiety and frustration at my failure to attend. 

It’s not just that other things are more interesting than my own feeble grabbling at good prose. I think I am also trying to dull a sense of failure that’s implicit in the comparison between my half-baked thoughts and the flawless aspect of the screen, glowing with cool and streamlined radiance all its own. The experience of sitting before a screen is one of heightened scrutiny and expectation, of feeling oneself always keeping score and being scored. The screen, after all, is also a display, a terminal—a monitor. But this heightened expectation as to what we should be doing is continually self-defeating. The idealized image of attention as control is therefore not so much a virtue as a phantom or mirage of one—tantalizing and exhausting. 

The ideal is part of what we might call an attentional “regime”: a context of uses characterized by the four assumptions I’ve contradicted above. These assumptions discipline our attention both to falling short as a matter of course and to getting back on track with renewed good-faith professions to succeed. That is, the regime consists not only of transgressive distractions, but of the acts of attentional contrition that we perform to get back on the wagon. Whether I am attending or distracted, it always comes back to tracking what I will and whether what I will is on track. This whole vicious circle is the message: a narrow and anxious reduction of experience into the terms of my own volition and its failures. 

This is, psychologically (rather than neurochemically) speaking, what is ultimately “addictive” about digital technology: the way in which it binds us to itself through ever renewed commitments to do better that are borne from our own lapses, the way we internalize its authority through the self-castigation of our attentional inadequacies. Mark Edmundson calls it our “second psyche,” our new super-ego. Digital technology is a constantly renewing cycle of heightened expectations and diminishing returns. And it is, for all these reasons, a spiritual technology: not just a tool, but a way of minding ourselves whole. 

Yet this attention—the idealized image of control—is not really attention, so much as its coopted simulacrum. If we move beyond the four assumptions I’ve noted above, I think we can see a better version of attention that does not involve keeping it on a shorter leash, so much as finding ways of tossing the leash away—or at least of awakening our interest to the ways in which we actively desire to keep ourselves leashed. When we look farther afield for better descriptions of attention—rapture, ecstasy, absorption—it’s clear that what they have in common is the losing track of time that is also the losing track of self. This is not the suppression of self-consciousness; that suppression is in itself how we affirm our self-consciousness to the point of distraction. Rather, it is a flightline—away from both the micro-vindications that entrap us in our screened selves and the oppression of being at all times enthralled, arrested, consumed. 

It is because we allow ourselves to be mastered by higher aims that we may master them. It is because we forget ourselves that we may come awake with abandon. The rest is mindfulness.