Your Attention = Your Reality
What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.
Hello friends 👋 In last week’s newsletter we talked about time, and how we can shift our perspective of it to feel more at peace and grateful. Let’s take a look at the other “issue” we have — our limited attention, and how to view it in a different light. Note that most of these insights are still taken from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which I’ve just finished reading.
What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is (Burkeman, p.91).
We know that our attention is finite. Multitasking is a myth that we wish was true. But unlike the other finite resources we rely on — water, food, money, etc., attention kind of... is life. “Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention” (p.91).
While our attention is finite, distractions, on the other hand, seem to be infinite. We often think about distractions as things that make us lose focus for a brief period on our current task — phone notifications, your cat walking over your keyboard. But distraction can be the task itself — it’s anything that requires us to invest a portion of our attention in, but that doesn’t have our highest interests at heart. It’s not just the few extra minutes, (or hours) we accidentally spend each day on our phone. In the grander scheme, whenever we pay attention to something we don’t especially value — that job that we hate but lack the motivation to get out from, or “friends” with whom we don’t especially enjoy to be around, it’s not an exaggeration to say that we’re paying with our life…
“Okay I get it. Distractions are bad. But I’ve got web-blocking apps, noise-canceling headphones, and I meditate daily! I’m indistractible and focused.” You may think that you are well armored against distractions, but Burkeman argues that this is a trap. We are just denying one of our many human limitations, which is that achieving total control over our attention is impossible. One explanation is that we have been evolutionarily evolved to being easily distracted (we need to be easily alerted for survival).
Although today, this evolutionary benefit is making us vulnerable to the exploitation of big tech companies — the online “attention economy”. We know well that TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, aren’t really free products. But rather, we are the products. We let the tech giants seize our attention, then sell it to advertisers. We also know that these apps were designed in a way to play into our psychology and getting us hooked. (Why TikTok is Addicting - It’s Not the Reason You Might Think).
What we seldom think about though, is that when we spent an hour scrolling through TikTok or Facebook and feel bad because we’ve “wasted an hour”, it’s not exactly just that... it’s far worse — we are getting our realities distorted. “Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling — instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful — it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times [...]. So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining important matters in the first place” (p.96). Once again, the price for these distractions can be our entire life.
And I’m not just talking about echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, which are largely causing the increase in political polarization, online cults, and conspiracy theories. Those are some of the more extreme effects of digital misinformation and distraction. Even if you are not brainwashed (although we all are, to some extent) by what you consume online, and you even limit your screen time to two hours a day, how many offline hours do you catch yourself thinking about an Instagram post from someone you genuinely do not care about, a disturbing tweet, or how to craft your own post? Intrinsically, we have accepted that a well-thought caption or tweet, or a certain number of likes is more important than being present and enjoying the moment itself. Or, that an online argument with a stranger shall consume our attention for the entirety of a vacation. Or even more commonly, phone notifications dominating our attention over a dinner spent with loved ones.
To make things more depressing, it’s hard to notice that our outlook on life is being changed — often for the worse, because the “only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered” (p.98). And that’s perhaps why most of us continue to let these distractions manipulate our realities and appropriating our finite time.
Although we can blame these tech giants for the attention economy, for paying “a thousand people on the other side of the screen” whenever we open a social media app, as Tristan Harris likes to say, we should face the fact that, much of the time, we are the culprit — we give in to distraction willingly. Something in us wants to be distracted away from things we thought we cared about the most. Whether it is a task that is approaching its deadline, a relationship, or that passion project. Why is it so? Shouldn’t we have evolved to be better than this? More on this in the next newsletter! 👋
BURKEMAN, O. L. I. V. E. R. (2022). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for mortals. PICADOR.
Favourites of the Week:
Website: MostRecommendedBooks.com - why didn’t I find out about this sooner! Book lists from the most influential people in the world. Including celebrities 🙂
Listened: Finished Both/And by Huma Abedin - an open, honest, and raw memoir of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s most famous top aid. Her story, as well as Hillary Clinton’s, is absolutely fascinating and inspiring.
*Please send me some book recommendations!*
Have a great weekend!
Ingrid
P.S. Talk to me (via replying to this email or IG)! What do you like? What do you dislike? What do you want to see? Please help me get better :) If you want to help even more, send your friends a link to sign up for this newsletter!
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