The power of attention in a world of distraction
Summary
Sean Illing welcomes Michael Sacasas, director of the Christian Study Center and author of The Convivial Society newsletter, to explore the deeper significance of attention beyond the typical discourse of the attention economy. They discuss how digital technologies and social media platforms are engineered to hijack our focus, but more importantly, they examine what our attention is for—framing it as a moral capacity essential for seeing the world truthfully and relating to others with care and generosity.
The conversation traces historical concerns about attention, from Blaise Pascal’s reflections on diversion in the 17th century to the industrial era’s quantification of focus. Sacasas distinguishes between two senses of attention: the common understanding as focused concentration and a more contemplative sense of openness and readiness to receive the world. They draw on thinkers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, who linked attention to love, justice, and the ability to overcome self-centeredness to perceive others as they truly are.
A central theme is how our techno-social environment, characterized by ubiquity and constant stimulation, makes it inhumanly difficult to cultivate the habits of deep attention required for meaningful relationships and personal flourishing. The discussion touches on the loneliness that drives us to seek validation online, the affective overload of platforms like Twitter that prevent deep emotional experience, and the way technology fosters a solipsistic, instrumental view of the world and other people.
Despite the stacked deck, Sacasas finds hope in small-scale agency—the individual and communal practices of refusal, the cultivation of silence and solitude for contrast, and the modest goal of helping a few readers navigate their world more wisely. The episode concludes with a reflection on the tragedy of misspent attention and the importance of striving for presence, even marginally, as a path to a more humane life.
Recommendations
Articles
- “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” — Nick Carr’s influential Atlantic article from 2008 is discussed as an early catalyst for thinking about how internet use erodes our capacity for deep, sustained reading and focus.
Books
- How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell’s book is mentioned as an example of attending to the non-human world (like birding), which discloses the world’s beauty and can lead to care and wonder.
Newsletters
- The Convivial Society — Michael Sacasas’s own newsletter is highly recommended by Sean Illing for its deep reflections on technology, attention, and human flourishing from a Christian humanist perspective.
People
- Simone Weil — The 20th century French philosopher is cited multiple times for her view of attention as a spiritual discipline and as ‘the rarest and purest form of generosity,’ essential for moral life.
- Iris Murdoch — The 20th century philosopher is referenced for equating attention with love and moral vision, and for identifying the ‘big fat ego’ or self-centeredness as the obstacle to seeing others truthfully.
- Blaise Pascal — The 17th century thinker is noted for his early theorizing on diversion (distraction), famously stating that ‘all of our problems stem from not being able to sit silently in a room.‘
Topic Timeline
- 00:00:39 — Introducing the theme with a Vonnegut story — Sean Illing opens by referencing Kurt Vonnegut’s short story ‘Harrison Bergeron,’ where a character is made dumber by a constant distracting radio in his ear. He draws a parallel to today’s attention economy and social media, suggesting the dystopian satire may not be as far-fetched as it seems. This sets the stage for a discussion on the crisis of attention in the digital age.
- 00:02:06 — Introducing guest Michael Sacasas and his perspective — Illing introduces his guest, Michael Sacasas, director of the Christian Study Center and author of The Convivial Society newsletter. He notes Sacasas writes about technology’s impact from a Christian humanist perspective, focusing not just on how attention is harvested but on the deeper question of what attention is for. Sacasas explains how his thinking evolved from Nick Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ to seeing attention as having moral and spiritual significance.
- 00:09:42 — Defining attention: focus vs. openness — Sacasas offers a two-part definition of attention. The first is the common understanding as focus or concentration, like a searchlight. The second, more interesting sense is a contemplative openness or readiness to receive experience, not looking for anything but being present. Illing connects this second sense to an orientation toward the world and others, a combination of openness and active stretching toward what is in front of us.
- 00:13:24 — Distraction as fleeing loneliness and self — The conversation turns to what we flee through distraction. Sacasas references Pascal’s idea that we avoid being alone with thoughts of mortality. He adds that we also crave to be attended to and acknowledged. Social media promised connection and visibility, feeding this desire but often failing to alleviate loneliness. Illing notes it’s never been easier to avoid solitude, forcing us to work against our environment to find silence.
- 00:18:40 — What is our attention for? — Illing poses the core question often missed: what deserves our attention? Sacasas answers that our fellow human beings deserve it, as does the world itself. He references Simone Weil’s view of education as training attention for prayer and Iris Murdoch’s equation of attention with love—a moral vision to see justly and overcome self-centered fantasies. Attention is for seeing the world truthfully.
- 00:22:44 — Attention as the rarest form of generosity — Discussing Simone Weil’s statement that ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,’ Sacasas explains it as the gift of being fully present to someone, especially in suffering. It requires getting ourselves out of the way. This fullness of presence is life-giving and creates conditions for deeper friendship, yet we’ve accustomed ourselves to never being fully present with others.
- 00:29:31 — We become what we attend to — Illing observes that we become what we pay the most attention to, reflecting the rhythms and biases of our technologies—becoming tools of our tools. Sacasas agrees, noting habits form our character. He cites Murdoch: ‘In the moment of decision, most of the work has already been done.’ Countless small instances of training our attention prepare us (or not) for serious moments requiring moral vision and care.
- 00:31:44 — Affect overload vs. shallow feeling — Moving from information overload to ‘affect overload,’ Sacasas describes the emotional whiplash of platforms like Twitter, where tragedy, outrage, and joy are presented in rapid succession. The problem isn’t feeling too much, but never being allowed to feel deeply and at length. The pacing of online experience prevents the depth of emotional processing, contributing to exhaustion.
- 00:37:14 — Technology fostering solipsism and instrumentalism — Illing asks if the most ethically destructive consequence is technology making us more solipsistic, reducing others to instruments in our curated world. Sacasas agrees, describing a ‘technological mode of being’ where life is an engineering problem, and the human condition is to be manipulated, not received. This perspective is deep in Western modernity and is reinforced by the technologies it creates.
- 00:44:09 — Sources of hope and agency — Asked what gives him hope, Sacasas says the fight isn’t over unless you stop fighting. He has no illusions of changing the world but aims to help a few readers navigate life more wisely and humanely. Hope lies in small-scale agency, refusing certain things, and striving in companionship with others. Even modest goods and raising the right questions are meaningful actions.
Episode Info
- Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
- Author: Vox
- Category: Society & Culture Philosophy News Politics News Commentary
- Published: 2022-12-08T10:30:00Z
- Duration: 00:46:56
References
- URL PocketCasts: https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/1d3ce9a0-ae3d-0133-2e33-6dc413d6d41d/the-power-of-attention-in-a-world-of-distraction/570f7f32-fc16-4c30-85d5-e589d22efa90
- Episode UUID: 570f7f32-fc16-4c30-85d5-e589d22efa90
Podcast Info
- Name: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
- Type: episodic
- Site: https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast
- UUID: 1d3ce9a0-ae3d-0133-2e33-6dc413d6d41d
Transcript
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[00:00:39] I was recently reminded of a Kurt Vonnegut short story from 1961.
[00:00:45] It’s called Harrison Bergeron.
[00:00:48] It’s a dystopian sci-fi tale set in a future America
[00:00:51] where total equality is imposed by the state.
[00:00:57] The totalitarian themes don’t hold up all that well.
[00:01:01] But the interesting part of the story is this.
[00:01:06] There’s one character who’s deemed too intelligent.
[00:01:10] And the way they make him dumber is by forcing him to wear a radio in his ear
[00:01:15] so that they can constantly distract him with obnoxious content.
[00:01:27] If you spend a lot of time thinking about social media
[00:01:32] and the attention economy today, as I do,
[00:01:36] it’s a pretty disturbing image.
[00:01:38] Is it a little over the top?
[00:01:40] Sure, it’s satire.
[00:01:42] But it may not be as far-fetched as it seems.
[00:01:49] I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
[00:01:57] My guest today is Michael Tsakasis.
[00:02:06] He’s the director of the Christian Study Center in Gainesville, Florida,
[00:02:11] and the author of one of my favorite newsletters called The Convivial Society.
[00:02:16] If you listen to this show, you already know that I’m worried about digital tech
[00:02:21] and its impact not just on our society, but on us as individuals.
[00:02:26] Individuals.
[00:02:26] Individuals.
[00:02:27] human beings. This is what Sakasas writes about as well as anyone, and he does it from a Christian
[00:02:33] humanist perspective. And I think that sets him apart from a lot of people in this space.
[00:02:39] His recent work has focused on what you might call our crisis of attention.
[00:02:44] Most of the stuff written on this topic is about how our technologies are getting better and better
[00:02:50] at harvesting our attention for money. And that’s important, for sure. But Sakasas raises a deeper
[00:02:56] question, often missed in this discourse. What is our attention for? Or to put it a little
[00:03:04] differently, why is our attention so important? When I was first writing about technology,
[00:03:12] I began thinking about technology and digital technologies more specifically. It was right
[00:03:16] around the time that Nick Carr’s article in The Atlantic came out. What I have always thought of
[00:03:21] as the poorly titled, is Google making you stupid? Because I think it kind of distracts from the main
[00:03:25] point of the article. But it rang.
[00:03:26] True to me, his description of the struggles he was having to attend to, it resonated. I thought,
[00:03:33] that sounds familiar. I think something’s going on here. So it became a recurring theme in my
[00:03:38] thinking and writing to consider this. It was actually later that I began to think about it
[00:03:43] more in terms of an issue that had moral and possibly even spiritual significance and not
[00:03:49] just an intellectual or cognitive issue. So that the question of attention wasn’t just a question
[00:03:54] about whether or not I could make it through war.
[00:03:56] If I wanted to, but that it had some deeper and more significant dimensions. Could I attend to
[00:04:03] the human being that I have before me in a way that honors their personhood, that honors the
[00:04:07] integrity of their humanness? And beyond that, even to be able to attend to the world and see
[00:04:12] it for what it is. And I realized there’s a long tradition of reflection that helps kind of frame
[00:04:18] those moral dimensions of attention. Simone Weil was a thinker that has been certainly influential
[00:04:24] in the way I think about this. Iris Murdoch,
[00:04:26] a 20th century philosopher, has also informed my thinking about this over the years as well
[00:04:31] and deepened my appreciation for what attention is and how we can think about it and how it really
[00:04:37] is, I think, central to the moral life, central to how we think about relationships and community
[00:04:42] and the threat that our capacity to attend to the world in this way is under a technological
[00:04:47] environment that takes advantage of tools for hijacking our attention.
[00:04:52] That old Nick Carr article, for people who may have forgotten or never read it,
[00:04:56] I mean,
[00:04:56] was the thesis of that, this idea that our increasing reliance on the internet,
[00:05:02] our dependency on these tools were making us dumber or making us more distractible and
[00:05:08] distracted. I don’t know that his point was ever that it was making us dumber. You know,
[00:05:12] I’ve always thought, again, that the title kind of sets you up to assume a more shallow article
[00:05:17] or puts people on the defensive. I think the distractedness was certainly part of it.
[00:05:21] I think what he felt was that, and this was in 2008, something was happening to his
[00:05:26] capacity to read seriously, to read for long stretches of time, that there was a fidgetiness
[00:05:32] that kind of entered into his experience that wasn’t there before. And his thesis is that
[00:05:36] internet use was essentially the culprit. And so he talked a little bit about McLuhan and the way
[00:05:42] that the medium independent of the content kind of shapes our perception and our mental habits
[00:05:47] or intellectual habits. So that was sort of the gist of it. It wasn’t, I don’t think the point
[00:05:50] was that it was making us dumber necessarily. People have been worrying about our ability to
[00:05:55] pay attention.
[00:05:56] For a very long time. The attention discourse, as you put it, this goes way back, right?
[00:06:02] I tend to think of the industrial era, maybe late 19th century, as where the first round of
[00:06:09] attention discourse really takes off in a form that we recognize it today. A lot of psychology
[00:06:14] that was happening around that time, kind of in the William James circuit of thinkers and
[00:06:19] practitioners, had to do with measuring attention, with quantifying it. Interestingly enough,
[00:06:25] trying to understand,
[00:06:26] and how different techniques for advertising captured attention or didn’t. And so I think
[00:06:33] the late 19th century, you have a very distinct eruption of interest in attention, the problem
[00:06:38] of attention. You can go a little further back. I think of Blaise Pascal writing in the 17th century
[00:06:44] and theorizing diversion, what we might today just call distractions. And somewhere he says
[00:06:50] famously that all of our problems stem from not being able to sit silently in a room. I don’t
[00:06:56] know of too many of them. I don’t know of too many of them. I don’t know of too many of them. I don’t
[00:06:56] know of too many other 17th century thinkers whose reflections on distractedness and diversion
[00:07:01] ring quite as familiar to us as his.
[00:07:06] Is there something unique or distinct about the crisis of attentiveness today that is unique to
[00:07:14] our time and the social and technological conditions in which we live now?
[00:07:20] So I think in one sense, you have these antecedents. You can find people complaining
[00:07:25] about attention. You can find people complaining about attention. You can find people complaining
[00:07:26] in similar ways in the late 19th century, say, or in the mid-20th century, or even if we think of
[00:07:32] the ADD discourse in the 1980s when I was growing up. And so there’s been this continuous trajectory
[00:07:39] of thinking and worrying about attention. I think in our present day, the ubiquity of our devices
[00:07:48] has amplified the problem in a way that is worth noting. It’s not nothing, right? There is an
[00:07:54] important way in which the volume, the constant presence of any myriad of distractions that we
[00:08:01] might want to turn to the fact that the moment I sit at a red light, I immediately reach for
[00:08:07] something to divert me or distract me or stimulate me, and I have access to that.
[00:08:13] So there’s uniqueness in terms of scale and availability and ubiquity, but the structure
[00:08:19] of the problem stands in this line of continuity, I think, with previous times and eras.
[00:08:24] Does that make sense?
[00:08:25] Yeah. I mean, hell, I don’t even remember the last time I went to the bathroom or went to brush my
[00:08:30] teeth without grabbing my damn phone. And if you’re listening out there, don’t judge me,
[00:08:34] because I know you’re doing it too. We’re all doing it. That’s new and probably really bad.
[00:08:40] I mean, I don’t feel great about what I know it’s doing to myself. If anybody’s listening,
[00:08:44] I don’t want to judge you in particular, but I think you’re right. It’s the easiest thing in
[00:08:48] the world to just give any random example of this and know that you’ve connected with 90%
[00:08:51] of your audience because they’re struggling with exactly the same thing.
[00:08:54] If I am interacting with somebody, I think of just kind of going through a checkout line
[00:09:00] somewhere in a retail store where they haven’t replaced the cashier with some kind of automated
[00:09:05] checkout system, right? But if I’m standing in front of a person and I’m unable to kind of look
[00:09:11] them in the eye, be present to them in that moment because I’m just too focused on whatever’s going
[00:09:18] on in the palm of my hand, I do think that’s a problem. I think we’re habituating ourselves to
[00:09:23] essentially kind of inhumanize them. And I think that’s a problem. I think we’re habituating
[00:09:24] ways of interacting with others. We should probably offer a definition of attention,
[00:09:30] or at least how you think about it, because it is kind of a big amorphous word. It probably
[00:09:36] means many different things in many different mouths. But what does it mean for you? I mean,
[00:09:42] what does it mean to be attentive? When I’m asked this question or when I start talking
[00:09:47] about attention and feel the need to kind of clarify in some sense, I think of at least two
[00:09:51] ways of understanding what we mean when we’re talking about attention. And I think of at least
[00:09:54] two ways of understanding what we mean when we say attention, right? So the most obvious way is
[00:09:56] what most of us immediately sort of intuit, right? That it’s focus. It’s this kind of idea of a
[00:10:00] searchlight that our mind focuses on some object, not entirely always outside of it, right? So I can
[00:10:07] imagine just trying to think about a problem, trying to solve something, trying to think
[00:10:10] through some issue. Can I focus on that issue in my mind? Or if I am trying to concentrate on
[00:10:16] reading a text, say, can I give it a sustained amount of focal energy, right? Like you’re
[00:10:22] willing yourself to pay attention to something, to attend to something, to do something, to do something, to do something.
[00:10:24] And I think that’s certainly part of it. And we feel the erosion of that capacity. So if I’m
[00:10:31] sitting down to do something, how long does it take me before I feel some part of me reaching
[00:10:37] for a device or reaching towards Twitter just for some kind of hit of something, right? And so
[00:10:42] there’s that kind of attention that’s synonymous with focus or concentration. I try to also think
[00:10:47] about attention as something like a kind of openness to experience where I’m not
[00:10:54] looking for anything, but I’m ready to receive something. It’s more of a contemplative stance
[00:11:00] towards my experience. And I think that’s also an interesting way of thinking about attention.
[00:11:06] So both what goes out and seeks for something with a measure of focus, but also a readiness
[00:11:12] to perceive what is there and openness to our experience, to the world beyond our heads.
[00:11:17] Yeah, that second sense, that’s the understanding of attention that is more interesting to me
[00:11:21] and less pondered over. You know, it’s almost
[00:11:24] attentiveness as an orientation toward the world and other people, you know, not just this
[00:11:29] innate capacity that we carry with us that we can deploy on a whim. Being attentive is moving
[00:11:38] through the world in a constant state of openness. But even that almost sounds too passive, right?
[00:11:44] I mean, it’s not just about being open. It’s also about being willing. As you’ve put it,
[00:11:50] it’s about stretching yourself toward, reaching out, tending to the things in front of you.
[00:11:54] Not just being this kind of vessel willing to receive. It’s this combination of being open,
[00:12:00] but also active. I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but…
[00:12:02] Yeah, I think it’s a little bit of both of those things. Simone Weil is interesting on this point.
[00:12:07] She wants to distinguish between willpower and attention or kind of create a little gap between
[00:12:13] the two of them. For instance, she thinks that when we are trying to reach for the solution of
[00:12:18] a problem, that what we really ought to be doing is clearing space. And, you know, I think that’s
[00:12:24] creating a kind of silence into which the answer we’re searching for can come, right? And so there
[00:12:29] is almost a kind of passivity there. She talks about in terms of waiting, right? What we’re
[00:12:34] doing is actually waiting. I think there are moments where that’s important, where that’s
[00:12:37] necessary. But certainly, I’ve come to prefer the language of attending to the language of
[00:12:42] attention because it does suggest a measure of care as well, right? That when I attend to somebody,
[00:12:47] it’s not just that I’m paying attention, which kind of drags in these economic metaphors,
[00:12:52] but rather that I am exhibiting care.
[00:12:54] care for them. And this is why I ought to cultivate my attention.
[00:12:58] I like that you’ve mentioned Simone Weil a couple of times. She’s, in my opinion,
[00:13:02] a criminally underappreciated 20th century French philosopher and someone I think of
[00:13:07] really as a moral genius. We’ll come back to her in just a second. I guess I would almost say that
[00:13:13] the opposite of being attentive in the way we’re describing now is almost what we tend to do,
[00:13:19] which is give ourselves over to distraction or diversion. Do you think
[00:13:24] that’s a useful contrast?
[00:13:27] Right. I mean, it’s almost as if that’s the more passive thing, right?
[00:13:30] Yeah.
[00:13:30] We’re passive when we are giving ourselves over to stimulation. I think of the state of
[00:13:37] doomscrolling that you are a wholly passive victim of your timeline in that state, right?
[00:13:43] Oh, yeah.
[00:13:44] And so that’s a useful contrast. And I think of it, too, as a kind of frenetic state.
[00:13:48] We often are multitasking. We’re asked to focus on a variety of,
[00:13:54] different tasks. Or we create situations for ourselves in which, for example,
[00:13:58] if I am trying to write, I also have my inbox and social media is ready to hand and kind of
[00:14:04] flip back and forth between those things. And so there’s a kind of frenetic pace to
[00:14:09] how I dart back and forth. And there’s a lack of steadiness to my thinking in those moments.
[00:14:16] There’s also something, I guess, maybe comforting about giving ourselves over in that way. I mean,
[00:14:20] you’ve connected this problem of distraction to the problem of loneliness,
[00:14:24] the question is, what is it that we want to be distracted or diverted from?
[00:14:29] Yeah.
[00:14:29] Is it loneliness? Is it this sense of truly being alone with our own thoughts,
[00:14:34] God forbid? I mean, is that the thing we’re fleeing?
[00:14:37] I mean, that was Pascal’s thing, right? That if you’re alone with your thoughts,
[00:14:40] you eventually start thinking about your mortality and other unpleasant things like that, right? And
[00:14:45] so you don’t want to do that. And so you look for diversions that can take your mind off of these
[00:14:50] sort of unpleasant things. A lot of times, the problem of attention and distraction in digital
[00:14:54] culture is connected to what advertisers want from us or addiction, compulsive engagement.
[00:15:01] And I think that’s all fine. There’s a lot of truth to all of that. But I think sometimes we
[00:15:04] just crave attention, right? We desire to be attended to. We desire for someone to acknowledge
[00:15:10] us, to recognize us in our own particularity. And if we lack that in our communities,
[00:15:16] in our households, in whatever social milieu we happen to be a part of,
[00:15:20] it’s only natural that we’re going to go searching for it. And so
[00:15:24] I think certainly the social web famously promised connection.
[00:15:28] And I think it was pretty natural for us to seek that kind of affirmation, that kind of visibility,
[00:15:33] that sense of being seen in these platforms that connected us with long-lost friends or thousands
[00:15:39] of strangers, right? And so that’s maybe one way in which we might think about how loneliness
[00:15:45] also can feed the demand side, I suppose, of distraction, because it ends up kind of hooking
[00:15:50] us as well as complicit with the design of the platforms then that don’t actually ever
[00:15:54] alleviate that loneliness. And, well, I won’t say ever, right, but often don’t alleviate that loneliness.
[00:15:59] So Pascal’s right, right? Maybe all of our problems stem from our inability to
[00:16:04] sit quietly in a room for half an hour. But it’s never been easier to move through your
[00:16:10] entire waking life without ever having to simply be alone. It’s never been easier.
[00:16:14] Right. It has made it so that we have to work against the grain of our kind of techno-social environment to find solitude—
[00:16:24] or silence. And if we already have a proclivity towards seeking out distraction, it’s one thing
[00:16:30] for those distractions to be available here and there, where we might have to put a little effort
[00:16:36] into seeking them out. It’s another thing for them to be literally at our fingertips constantly all
[00:16:41] the time. We have to work very hard to put ourselves out of a situation where we did not
[00:16:46] have ready access to some kind of stimulation or distraction.
[00:16:54] In a world with more options than ever before, how do we actually figure out what’s worth paying
[00:17:06] attention to? That’s coming up after a quick break.
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[00:18:21] We’ve been talking so much about what’s happened to our attention.
[00:18:40] I want to ask, what do you think our attention is for? Because that is the question that,
[00:18:45] as you point out, we don’t ask enough, or we ask it very rarely. We’re much more familiar with
[00:18:51] the things that are pulling on our attention, with the things that are diverting our focus
[00:18:55] one way or the other. But the question that’s much harder to answer is, what actually deserves
[00:19:02] our attention? Do you have a good answer to that? I have some answers to that. I think my fellow
[00:19:09] human being deserves my attention, right? When they’re right in front of me and we’re interacting
[00:19:14] one way or another, whether that’s a friend in conversation, the stranger that I meet in passing,
[00:19:21] I think that’s a good answer. I think that’s a good answer. I think that’s a good answer.
[00:19:21] It’s good for me to be able to attend to them without distraction, to not feel that I have to
[00:19:28] look away or that I have to fidget with something. In a sense, not give them my eyes, right? Not give
[00:19:33] them the fullness of my presence, which I think is a kind of gift we give to each other. I suppose
[00:19:38] one answer to that question, Simone Weil, there’s an essay in which she reduces the whole of education
[00:19:45] to just an exercise in training our attention so that we can pray. Now, that’s not going to be
[00:19:51] everybody’s answer, but I think in certain spiritual traditions, there’s certainly something
[00:19:55] to be said for that, right? That we cultivate our attention as a kind of spiritual discipline.
[00:20:00] So, that’s another way of thinking about that. And depending on one’s values and the goods one
[00:20:04] pursues in one’s life, there may be a hierarchy of goods that deserve our attention.
[00:20:09] Don’t you think people want to be attuned in that way? Don’t you think people want to be connected
[00:20:13] in that way, even if they behave in ways that undercut that? It’s almost like we are choosing
[00:20:19] to do things that cut against our ability to do things. And I think that’s a good answer.
[00:20:20] That cut against our deepest needs. We are choosing to do things that are anathema to what
[00:20:25] we most fundamentally want. And so, I guess the question is, why the hell do we keep doing it
[00:20:31] to ourselves? We could do otherwise. We could close the laptop, go out and look people in the
[00:20:38] eyes and engage with other human beings much more than we do. No one’s saying that we can’t.
[00:20:44] So, why the hell don’t we?
[00:20:45] I mean, I think there are probably a lot of answers to that. Murdoch, in her discussion of attention,
[00:20:50] she kind of equates attention with love, this kind of moral vision to see justly,
[00:20:56] to see truthfully, the way we connect with the world in order to see in this way she calls love,
[00:21:01] Ivor Smirdog does. And she says what gets in the way of that is what she in one essay calls our
[00:21:06] big fat ego, right? So, this kind of essential selfishness maybe that some of us might find
[00:21:12] ourselves struggling with. We’re naturally self-centered in the sense that every experience
[00:21:16] we have is through our lens, right? We are the center of our world.
[00:21:20] And it’s hard to overcome that. It’s hard to get out of that. And for Bay, for Murdoch,
[00:21:26] this is sort of the point of training your attention. It is to get out of ourselves so
[00:21:31] that we can see the other truthfully. We can see the world as it actually is rather than imposing
[00:21:37] on it these webs of what Murdoch calls fantasies at one point, self-centered fantasies. So,
[00:21:43] to go back to what is attention for, it is simply to see the world truthfully, to see the world
[00:21:48] in a way that isn’t as…
[00:21:50] As warped by our natural self-centeredness. So, and I think we want this. I think we want
[00:21:55] this for ourselves. I think all of us have had some experience of meeting somebody, passing
[00:22:00] some kind of judgment on them, but then for whatever reason, having to spend more time with
[00:22:05] them, get to know them, attend to them, maybe with a measure of openness that wasn’t there
[00:22:10] initially and recognizing that our prejudgments were entirely off base. And so, that kind of
[00:22:16] attention, patient attention over time to a person helps us.
[00:22:20] It helps us to see them for who they are, corrects our vision. And we would want the
[00:22:23] same for ourselves, right? We would want somebody to attend to us in that way also. If I’m unable,
[00:22:30] unwilling to do that, either because of kind of a native self-centeredness or because I’ve
[00:22:34] been habituated to be inattentive, to be constantly distracted by devices, then I never have the
[00:22:40] opportunity to come to see people as they are, to perceive the truth of things.
[00:22:44] Well, they said that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
[00:22:48] Yes.
[00:22:49] What did she mean by that?
[00:22:50] So, she talks about, for example, the attention that we might give a sufferer, right?
[00:22:55] To pay attention to someone in suffering. She says it’s almost like a miracle. It is
[00:22:59] a miracle, right? To be able to offer ourselves up in that way. In some respects, to get ourselves
[00:23:06] out of the way, getting out of the way of ourselves so that we’re able to see people
[00:23:11] for who they are, to give them the gift of our attention, which honestly may be one of
[00:23:17] the most profound gifts that we can offer to somebody.
[00:23:19] Right.
[00:23:20] To be able to be fully present before them, especially when what we have accustomed
[00:23:25] ourselves to, even with those whose company we enjoy, we’re never quite fully present to them,
[00:23:29] right? And we’ve kind of made our peace with this to some degree. But I think if we get a
[00:23:34] taste of the fullness of somebody’s presence kind of open before us, there’s something very
[00:23:40] life-giving and affirming and rewarding and satisfying about that. It creates the conditions,
[00:23:44] I think, for a true and deeper friendship. So, that’s the kind of generosity, I think, that
[00:23:48] is grounded in a willingness to pay attention to attend in that way.
[00:23:53] I wonder if we actually can be fully present in that way or if we can really give
[00:24:01] our attention over to other people in that way in a world that’s increasingly virtual.
[00:24:06] Does this kind of being in the world with other people require actually being in the world
[00:24:13] with other people, physically sharing a space, looking them in the eye? Can you be fully present?
[00:24:18] fully present to people when they’re not standing in front of you? That’s a great question. My
[00:24:24] temptation is to say, no, not quite, which is not to invalidate something like what we’re doing
[00:24:30] right now. I’m glad to be having this conversation. I did notice early on during the pandemic when
[00:24:36] everything went on to Zoom and people were sort of talking about why they were so tired after
[00:24:42] Zooming for eight hours. I was thinking about what are the dynamics of the experience that
[00:24:47] maybe are taxing us in ways we don’t recognize. One interesting thing about doing that is that
[00:24:52] you can never quite see somebody eye to eye, right? If I give you my eyes by looking at the
[00:24:58] camera, I lose yours and vice versa, right? And so this inability to make eye contact.
[00:25:04] One of the things we lose is the meaningfulness of silence between two people who may be in a
[00:25:09] room together. Different situations obviously call for different kinds of interactions, right? But
[00:25:13] sometimes the best we could do is just be with a person to give our presence.
[00:25:17] Not our words. I don’t think you can do that very well online or at all, actually, in some
[00:25:23] platforms, right? You can’t be silent meaningfully. When I think of people who I’ve come to know
[00:25:28] over many years, just online, I’ve never met them in person. I don’t think I have an inauthentic
[00:25:33] relationship with them, but I do think I have an incomplete relationship with them. And my desire
[00:25:38] would be to eventually meet them in person one day, to sit across a table with them.
[00:25:44] Yeah. But hey, look, you know, the flip side of this coin is I’m looking at you,
[00:25:47] right now. I can see you right now. It’s not the same thing as if we were sitting on my back deck
[00:25:52] right now, but it’s better than a DM exchange, you know? And I’m thankful for that. I guess part
[00:26:00] of the reason I bring this up too is there is a temptation in these sorts of discussions
[00:26:04] to almost sort of castigate people, you know, as though it’s our fault that we’re choosing to do
[00:26:11] this thing when we should be doing this thing, or we’re lazy, or we’re uncaring, or whatever.
[00:26:16] When in reality, actually,
[00:26:17] we have engineered a world that has made it increasingly difficult to do these deeply human
[00:26:23] things. It’s not as though we’re all bad and aren’t interested. It’s just we’ve made it harder
[00:26:27] and harder, and people are trying in spite of those obstacles. And I just think that’s worth
[00:26:32] saying. Well, that’s absolutely worth saying. Yeah. In fact, there’s a recurring dynamic,
[00:26:37] which goes back to some 19th century theorists of attention, right? Where essentially we generate
[00:26:42] an environment that demands an inhuman amount of attention. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
[00:26:47] And when we’re not able to give it, that is construed as a failure of the individual rather
[00:26:55] than as a fault of the technosocial environment. And then that inattention is pathologized,
[00:27:01] and then techniques are deployed to correct it, right? Without ever questioning the environment
[00:27:08] that we’ve created. And so I think that’s certainly a part of the picture as well.
[00:27:14] I think about these things all the time. I’m having conversations like this,
[00:27:17] one on one, and one on the other. And I think that’s certainly a part of the picture as well.
[00:27:17] Right now, and yet, I’m sleepwalking through my life all the time. I’m failing to be present
[00:27:24] all the time for whatever reason. I’m constantly reaching for my screen so as to avoid that
[00:27:29] potentially awkward, unpredictable interaction with another free human being in front of me.
[00:27:35] And the thing about attention is the stuff we wasted on is tragic. The time we spend paying
[00:27:44] attention to shit that doesn’t matter.
[00:27:47] I don’t think there’s any question on my deathbed that one of my many regrets will be
[00:27:54] all the misspent attention in my life, you know? I mean, it’s just, it’s crazy.
[00:28:00] There’s some kind of line here to tread where you recognize that the deck is stacked against us.
[00:28:06] There are forces that have created an inhuman environment that we navigate
[00:28:11] that asks us to operate at a scale, at a pace, at an intensity.
[00:28:17] That is draining, that is not compatible with human flourishing given our limits,
[00:28:23] our embodiment. So that’s one side of it. And then the other side is where can we assume some
[00:28:29] measure of agency? You know, where can we assume some measure of responsibility for navigating
[00:28:35] that environment more wisely, more successfully in ways that can help us maybe not feel quite so
[00:28:44] regretful about our choices in the long run?
[00:28:47] And so there’s both of those things. I don’t want to lose sight of either of those.
[00:28:51] I don’t want to just blame big tech companies for failures that I know are actually mine to some
[00:28:58] degree. But then I also want to recognize that in some cases I’m fighting an uphill battle because
[00:29:03] of the way that my world has been structured. I have always sort of believed that we become
[00:29:08] in a strange way what we pay the most attention to. And the more time we spend glued to our
[00:29:15] screens and our devices, the more we start to lose sight of what we’re doing. And I think that’s
[00:29:17] where we start to reflect the rhythms and the biases of those technologies, which I guess is
[00:29:23] just another way of saying we become the tools of those tools. And that is the beginning of
[00:29:28] the erosion of our agency.
[00:29:31] Yeah. No, I think that’s well put. We become what we attend to over time,
[00:29:34] or we assume its patterns and its rhythms. Yeah, certainly so.
[00:29:38] And that is the thing about the technology today, the level of sophistication. I’m just
[00:29:42] going to quote you now. You wrote,
[00:29:47] The effect of this or that particular artifact or system. It also matters how the distinctive
[00:29:53] shape of our material environment conditions us in deep and broad ways, ways that may often be
[00:29:58] imperceptible precisely because they are not objects of perception, but rather shape our
[00:30:03] perception. These things are shaping us in ways that are so deep it is scarcely recognizable.
[00:30:12] They ingrain habits in us, which I think is a helpful way of thinking about this. I think a
[00:30:16] lot of times we imagine that we’re not able to do that. We’re not able to do that. We’re not able
[00:30:16] to do that. We’re not able to do that. We’re not able to do that. We’re not able to do that. We’re not
[00:30:17] able to do that. We’re not able to do that. We’re not able to do that. We’re not able to do that.
[00:30:17] You know, we will just in the moment do the right thing without giving sufficient attention to
[00:30:23] the habits that we have been forming all along the way before we arrive at that moment.
[00:30:29] You know, Murdoch has a really interesting way of talking about this. She says,
[00:30:33] In the moment of decision, most of the actions already happen. And it’s in how we have trained
[00:30:39] our attention all of our lives up to that moment of decision that matters. You know,
[00:30:46] what have we trained ourselves to?
[00:30:47] How have we trained our capacity to attend to the world? If we haven’t done that well
[00:30:53] in countless small instances along the way, when some moment calls for it in a more serious
[00:31:00] way, then we’re not going to be prepared to rise to that moment. But it’s not because we
[00:31:04] failed in that moment. It’s because we had countless other opportunities to train ourselves
[00:31:08] in this way, to train my attention, to see the world more sympathetically, more empathetically,
[00:31:13] to see others, not just through my own self-interested lens.
[00:31:16] And if I’m able to train myself, discipline my attention in that way, then in that moment of
[00:31:21] decision, you know, where the sufferer calls for my attention, the moment arises where I can give
[00:31:27] the gift of attention to someone, I’m able to do that because I have been habituating myself already.
[00:31:34] But we cannot attend to everything that’s happening everywhere. And people talk a lot
[00:31:39] about overload, information overload. And you talk about affect overload. You know,
[00:31:44] a site like Twitter,
[00:31:46] which is, you know, the locus of my social media experience for the most part,
[00:31:50] it’s just exquisite at making us constantly feel this or that way. But as you point out,
[00:31:57] there’s a shallowness to it, right? It’s not that we’re feeling too much necessarily. It’s
[00:32:02] that we’re never allowed to feel deeply and at length.
[00:32:06] Yeah. Twitter is also the locus of my social media presence. And I think the idea that it
[00:32:10] was affect load that was a problem came to me a while ago. I think I just thought of that chiefly
[00:32:15] as a matter of, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t
[00:32:16] know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
[00:32:16] I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
[00:32:16] Being asked to care, being asked to be angry about something, being asked to
[00:32:21] sympathize with something, et cetera, et cetera, over and over again with things that were near,
[00:32:25] things that were far, things that I had natural connection to, things that I didn’t.
[00:32:29] That’s exhausting, right? Sometimes I think the arc of digital media bends towards
[00:32:33] exhaustion in countless ways, and that’s one of them, right? But then what occurred to me
[00:32:37] more recently was that it’s not that I’m feeling too much. It’s almost as if I’m
[00:32:41] not allowed to feel enough, right? So I’m confronted with some tragedy.
[00:32:45] So I’m confronted with some tragedy.
[00:32:45] In my own experience, there’s a natural pacing to that grief. There’s a natural pacing to the way that I’m able to work through or experience the depth of that grief or alternatively of that joy. But I’m not given the time to do that with the pacing of what I encounter online, right?
[00:33:04] So it’s another tragic mass shooting, followed by some political outrage, followed by some cat video, followed by some great news about a friend who had some wonderful thing happen to them. And I’m flitting through these things in a way that I am unable to really allow the depth of that emotional experience to take hold.
[00:33:28] The problem is that we’re asked to inhabit an environment that presumes we have no limits when in fact we have limits.
[00:33:33] I think recognizing that is at least part of the answer. You know, I can’t read it all. I can’t stay on top of everything. And for me to try to do so would be ruinous for me.
[00:33:55] We’re going to take one last quick break. But when we come back, our technology makes it very easy to stay immersed in ourselves.
[00:34:03] What’s that doing to us?
[00:34:33] We’ll be right back.
[00:34:33] We’ll be right back.
[00:35:03] We’ll be right back.
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[00:37:03] We were talking about attention as a kind of emptying of oneself and being open to
[00:37:14] other human beings principally. Is for you perhaps the most ethically destructive consequence of our
[00:37:23] techno-social environment the fact that it makes us more solipsistic, that it draws us more and
[00:37:30] more into ourselves because fundamentally it reduces us to a more self-aware state of mind?
[00:37:33] To consumers. And these things exist to harvest our attention for profit. And the way it does
[00:37:39] that is by incentivizing more consumption, better consumption, curating our worlds more and more for
[00:37:45] us. Is that maybe the most problematic part of all this in terms of what it’s doing to us as
[00:37:52] human beings and our relationships with other human beings? Yeah, certainly. I mean, one way
[00:37:57] of thinking about this, it’s just not good for me in the deepest sense of that, right?
[00:38:03] Denying me the capacity to receive the joys, the satisfactions that are proper to my humanity,
[00:38:13] right? The consolations of deep and abiding friendships of community, the ability to
[00:38:18] recognize the need of the other and respond in care to them. The ability to receive the world
[00:38:25] and experience it as something that I can be grateful for. And I mean the world broadly,
[00:38:29] to include my neighbor, my own children,
[00:38:33] but the beauty of the natural world as well. Jenny O’Dell in her book, How to Do Nothing,
[00:38:39] talks about some of these themes as well. So she takes up birding and she’s able to begin to
[00:38:44] perceive various bird calls, right? What’s revealed there is that if we give our attention,
[00:38:50] even to the non-human world, long enough, it discloses itself to us in a way that
[00:38:56] is really satisfying and can bring a lot of pleasure and joy, but even offer wisdom. We
[00:39:03] might care more about the world, but we might care more about the world. And so,
[00:39:03] outside of ourselves, if we learn to perceive its depth and its beauty, which I think we don’t
[00:39:12] allow ourselves to do, it all blends into a kind of amorphous and distinct reality out there. But
[00:39:18] when we attend to it, it begins to pop out. Its individuality pops out. The particularities of
[00:39:23] the world pop out, might even allow for the possibility of wonder at what is there, because
[00:39:29] we begin to see the gratuity, the contingency of existence, that this thing exists as a
[00:39:33] wonder. And so, I think it’s really important that we learn to perceive its depth and its beauty,
[00:39:33] because we begin to see the gratuity, the contingency of existence, that this thing exists as a
[00:39:33] wonder. And so, I think it’s really important that we learn to perceive its depth and its beauty,
[00:39:33] those experiences that I think are part of the fullness of our humanity or draw out the
[00:39:40] fullness of our humanity, all of them in some sense are conditioned on our ability to attend
[00:39:43] to the world. I’ve said this before, and I guess I’ll just say it again. Our lives are becoming
[00:39:50] so mediated and the technology is becoming so immersive that it does feel like we are
[00:39:55] losing a lot of our agency. We still have the illusion of agency because we have all these
[00:40:00] choices and we’re constantly choosing. And so, I think it’s really important that we
[00:40:03] but there must come a point at which the individual is so manipulated and so deeply
[00:40:09] understood by the algorithms or the machines doing the manipulating that we’re not really free in any
[00:40:15] meaningful sense anymore. Do you think we even know when we’ve crossed that threshold? Have we
[00:40:21] already? I guess I’m still asking the question, so the game isn’t completely over, but do you
[00:40:26] think we’ll even know if or when we crossed that threshold and we’ve actually effectively lost
[00:40:31] our agency?
[00:40:32] You know, I think it’s even interesting to think about the way we want to even outsource
[00:40:37] the choosing to allow the algorithm to curate our experiences for us. You need some point
[00:40:43] of contrast, right, in order to recognize how deeply maybe we’ve compromised our agency.
[00:40:49] If all I ever know is the world through the lens of my smartphone camera or the world
[00:40:55] that’s mediated to me by my Twitter timeline, then that becomes the default setting. I can’t
[00:41:00] know any differently.
[00:41:02] I might not even know myself well in that point. So to be able to step away from that,
[00:41:07] from meaningful periods of time, not because we’re trying to kind of monkishly retreat from
[00:41:12] the world, but because we need that point of contrast, we need that different sort of
[00:41:17] experience, the silence, the solitude, to maybe begin to know when we are truly free or when we
[00:41:27] are acting with a greater degree of freedom. I don’t know if truly free is the right word. I
[00:41:32] think it’s the right word.
[00:41:32] You know, we’re always conditioned to some degree, but we have this slight control over
[00:41:36] our attention. There is a measure of freedom in that.
[00:41:39] Or even not so much truly free, but truly present, truly attentive in the way we’ve
[00:41:42] been talking about, right?
[00:41:43] Yeah, right.
[00:41:44] The part of this that can be really difficult to talk about because it is so abstract, but
[00:41:50] you know, we’re not just talking about technology as the tools we use to do things in the world.
[00:41:55] We’re talking about technology almost as an ideology or technology as a way of relating
[00:42:00] to the world.
[00:42:01] You talk about this relationship in terms of mastery and control. We come to see everything,
[00:42:07] including other people, as instruments, as things to be manipulated and optimized and
[00:42:12] exploited because we’re constantly manipulated and optimized and exploited. That’s our experience
[00:42:20] of the world, and that bleeds into how we see ourselves and how we see other people and how
[00:42:26] we see the world. How could it not?
[00:42:29] Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:42:31] The desire to control, to master, to optimize. You know, it’s hard. I sometimes distinguish
[00:42:39] when I’m asked, what is technology? The easy thing to point to is, of course, the artifact
[00:42:45] we hold in hand. That’s, I think, the way we tend to think about it. But if we expand
[00:42:50] that to include not just novel digital technologies, but all of the material artifacts that surround
[00:42:55] us, and that’s all fine and good, but that there might be a, what could justly be called,
[00:43:01] a technological mode of being, or a technocratic mode of being, where life is essentially a large
[00:43:09] engineering problem to be solved. The only questions worth asking are the ones that can
[00:43:14] be definitively answered through data. The human condition is not something to be experienced and
[00:43:22] abided and received, but something to be manipulated and, in the worst cases, exploited.
[00:43:27] That’s a disposition that I think, certainly, Western modernity,
[00:43:31] has deep in its DNA, and it’s shaped the kind of technology that we’ve made and then
[00:43:35] kind of created a feedback loop where those technologies then ingrain that perspective
[00:43:41] in how they mediate the world to us.
[00:43:43] Yeah. You know, that’s why I brought up solipsism earlier. The more we live in our
[00:43:47] own heads, the more everyone else in our field of awareness become a prop in our movie, in
[00:43:54] our story.
[00:43:55] Yeah, right, right, right.
[00:43:56] We don’t see them as human beings. We just see them as things, as, you know,
[00:44:01] pawns in whatever game we’re playing. Yeah.
[00:44:03] Yeah. I guess I just want to ask you, what gives you hope? What inspires you? I mean,
[00:44:09] it’s our nature because of what we do to reflect on all these things that are broken and wrong,
[00:44:13] but not everything is broken and wrong. What is it that gives you hope? What is it that makes
[00:44:18] you think the fight isn’t over?
[00:44:19] One way of answering that is that the fight isn’t over unless you stop fighting.
[00:44:24] Yeah.
[00:44:24] And I think, in one respect, I have no illusions about changing the world.
[00:44:31] And so, the way I think about it, the scale at which I think about it, is that maybe one or two
[00:44:37] readers find something that resonates and helps them in a way that makes them happier, in a way
[00:44:45] that allows them to feel more at home in the world, relate to their family or partners in a way that’s
[00:44:53] more satisfying, more life-giving, more humane, and that that’s good. I mean, I don’t have the
[00:44:58] ambitions to do any more than that, right?
[00:45:01] Yeah.
[00:45:01] To be helpful for a few. I think whenever we talk about these things, I think you’re right,
[00:45:05] a lot of people realize they want things to be different. We don’t have, as individuals
[00:45:10] necessarily, the agency to wholly overturn the whole techno-economic order, right? But
[00:45:16] maybe we can find ways of navigating it more wisely, of finding the strength to refuse some
[00:45:21] things that maybe we thought we couldn’t, especially if we’re able to do it in
[00:45:25] companionship with others. So, I think the answer is just, it’s good
[00:45:31] to keep striving after these things, even if we only achieve a kind of marginal
[00:45:38] amount of success, or even if the goods we achieve are modest. Those are something.
[00:45:42] Your newsletter and even your Twitter feed is a kind of poured in the storm, as it were.
[00:45:49] I’m glad to hear that. That’s encouraging. I think oftentimes that’s what I think of what
[00:45:53] I am doing is, in some cases, not giving even prescriptions, but raising questions.
[00:45:57] The right questions can often go a long way.
[00:45:59] Hear, hear. Michael,
[00:46:01] Sucasus, thanks so much for doing this. I cannot recommend Michael’s newsletter enough. It’s called
[00:46:06] The Convivial Society. You should go check it out. Thanks for doing this again, man.
[00:46:10] Thank you, Sean. Really enjoyed it.
[00:46:27] Eric Janikas is our producer. Amy Drozdowska is our editor.
[00:46:31] Patrick Boyd engineered this episode. Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
[00:46:36] And A.M. Hall is the boss.
[00:46:38] I absolutely loved talking to Michael. I don’t always agree with anyone, but I agree with a lot
[00:46:46] of what he says. And even when I don’t, I just appreciate the depth of his thought.
[00:46:52] He’s kind of concerned with the state of our soul, with how we’re doing as human beings, and
[00:47:00] And I don’t think we can get enough of that.
[00:47:03] And that’s why I read his newsletter.
[00:47:04] And that’s why I had him on the show.
[00:47:07] Let us know what you think.
[00:47:08] As always, drop us a line at thegrayareaatbox.com.
[00:47:14] And if you appreciated this episode, please share it with your friends.
[00:47:18] Post about it on Reddit.
[00:47:20] Or hell, throw your phone into the freaking ocean and have a real human interaction instead.
[00:47:25] In any event, we really appreciate it.
[00:47:27] New episodes drop on Mondays and Thursdays.
[00:47:31] Listen and subscribe.