Attention, Abundance and Activations
attention is intended to be a multisensory experience 👁🗨
The Breakout Rooms covered in this post:
Tech
Spirituality
Culture
“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”- Henry Miller
We’re all overloaded with information and feel increasingly burden by things grasping for our attention. It’s one of the drawbacks of modern life. There’s even a day dedicated to information overwhelm (20 October). I’m not so sure I’ll be celebrating it this year.
We know that the attention economy is reshaping our world. But the point that everyone misses about attention and the attention economy is that attention isn’t one-dimensional. Attention is a multisensory human experience and part of a natural sequence which creates abundance and activations in its wake.
Being able to give your attention to something is a precious, organic thing, not something that you should dread because of forced superficial stimuli. It’s why Simone Weil claimed that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” We need to reclaim the purity and gravity that underlies the essence of our attention. If you don’t value where your attention is placed, others certainly won’t.
Why aren’t we feeling, talking and giving voice to the experience that attention, the abundance we gain in the process of offering our attention and the activations it causes within our internal and external world? Where is the conversation about the dance of energetic exchange between interacting, giving and receiving attention? Why has the conversation about attention become so restrictive, heavy and one-dimensionally reduced and warped by how we interact with the internet and technology? Is giving our attention to something or someone that much of a burden?
2025 will be the year of information overwhelm thanks to chaotic political news inflamed by Trump and his Attention Presidency. AI is unleashing more information into the internet, and we are receiving more emails now than ever before (thank you for paying attention to mine though 💗). This is why it’s important for us to re-think our understanding of attention and how we can revitalise our experience with it.
Are you willing to take your attentional power back? I certainly am.
I can already sense a vibe-shift when it comes to how we discuss and think about attention. Maybe you can sense it too.
Many of us perceive the attention economy as a brutal, relentless force, constantly hovering around us, wanting to hook us, suck us in and sell sell sell to us. It suggests that the creator of attention is take, take, taking it from you and that they hold all the power. But equally, you are give, give, giving it in return.
Your attentional power has value. It shouldn’t be so willingly taken for granted or being taken advantage of. Especially as you are supposed to, as a multisensory human being, feel abundant and activated in the process of offering your attention. Equally, so is the attention receiver. The dynamic is supposed to be a balanced energetic exchange. This is why we need to carefully discern who or what we’re giving our attention to. What is the attention-seeker’s intention?
Scrolling through life impacts how you move through it and how you engage with things, living or not. We’ve all experienced this to a degree. Societally, it’s making us indifferent to things we really can’t afford to be indifferent about. Our attention is a wake-up call to action.
There’s a heaviness when we talk about attention because it has become increasingly associated with selling and marketing with storytelling also being understood as “storyselling.” No wonder more of us are buying dumbphones with our attention feeling drained and deadened by the slow and painful process of brainrot. We want to break free. So does our attention and capacity to connection with ourselves and others.
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Your humanness is not given to you. Instead, it demands your active participation in its construction and realization.
Through experiences it encourages you to instill an emotional response and attach meaning to things. And this is the exact thing that the attention economy doesn’t want you to do.
The central focus of the attention economy is to make money by churning out more and more content instead of encouraging you to relish and stay connected within the richness of the thing and moment you’re paying attention to. I don’t think it was nature’s plan to rush our experience of things. So why do so many of us readily accept this?
Attention without direction is useless. When you give and engage deeply with something, it makes you feel more vital, grounded and alive in the process. How often do you hold attention? Embrace it? If not why not?
The whole point of attention is to awaken something within you – a thought, feeling, connection and resonance. It’s why I love “long-form” content – give me essays, art, books and films any day of the week and I’m happy. No, I’m not only happy, I’m also WELL NOURISHED.
Call me controversial, but I don’t believe that content is there to be consumed like wolfing down a hot dog in New York in record time because you’re feeling peckish on the way to a meeting. It’s there to be slowly embraced and appreciated. Attention, in its most positive form, is supposed to feel freeing and energising.
If you give something your attention, then there’s a strong chance that it’s offering you something that you like and makes you feel good. Alternatively, it may be hooking you through fear and negativity. This projected negative attention – attention which you aren’t actively seeking but your accidental experience interacting with it is projected on to you and subconsciously absorbed by you – is what is causing widespread disconnection between the relationship and natural flow between attention, abundance and our activations.
Attention is energy and energy is attention. It requires a sacred pause to appreciate how precious it is. It’s why the American poet Mary Oliver said, “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.”
As the Latin root of attention suggests, we are attending to something. Rather than attention being a transactional, digital experience, attention, as experienced in full multisensory living splendour, can lead to nurture, affection and alive awakenings. Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Seeing brings the fullness of reality to consciousness.
Where are you placing your attention and why?
What a beautifully expansive meditation on attention — one that resists the cheap reduction of our focus to a mere commodity and instead restores it to its rightful place as a generative force. Your invocation of Weil, Miller, and Oliver is particularly apt; they understood that attention is not just about looking but about seeing, and in seeing, creating meaning. I loved this!
In an era of infinite scroll and algorithmic seduction, your call to reclaim the sovereignty of our attention is both urgent and necessary. Too often, we surrender it passively — ensnared by digital stimuli designed not to nourish but to deplete. The very economy of attention you critique thrives on fragmentation, on the illusion that consuming more equates to knowing more, feeling more, being more. But as you so eloquently point out, the opposite is true: real attention, deep attention, requires presence. And presence — whether in a blade of grass or a great work of literature — is where life actually happens.
The idea that attention should nourish rather than drain is a radical reorientation, one that invites us to shift from passive consumption to active engagement. To truly see something is to enter into a reciprocal relationship with it. And yet, we’ve been conditioned to believe that our engagement must always be productive, our attention always transactional. The result? An exhaustion of the senses, a thinning of experience, a loss of interiority.
The “sacred pause” you reference is precisely what’s missing from most discussions about attention. We lament its hijacking but rarely acknowledge that its redemption lies not in withdrawing from the world but in re-learning how to attend to it. We need to rediscover the difference between looking and seeing, between hearing and listening. That requires discipline, but more importantly, it requires desire.
Attention, at its core, is an act of love — love for an idea, a piece of art, a conversation, a moment of stillness. And love, as we know, cannot be hurried. Perhaps 2025 will be the year we stop treating our attention as a currency and start treating it as a gift.
Attention is focused by our bodies needs. Exploiting this attention to beauty mechanism has ruined my brain. My attention has been stolen are focused on things that scare me.