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.
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.
So well said and explored Tamara! “The very economy of attention you critique thrives on fragmentation, on the illusion that consuming more equates to knowing more, feeling more, being more.” Absolutely yes. We need to be able to distinguish what is real and important — what is real and important to us as individual human beings.
Attention should be restorative — it’s an offer of exchange, it should nurture us and enhance us and our soul, somehow. This is so off balance right now in terms of how we understand attention because of the attention economy and the attention presidency.
Thank you so much for your incredibly generous and thought-provoking response, and most importantly, your attention 💫
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.
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.
So well said and explored Tamara! “The very economy of attention you critique thrives on fragmentation, on the illusion that consuming more equates to knowing more, feeling more, being more.” Absolutely yes. We need to be able to distinguish what is real and important — what is real and important to us as individual human beings.
Attention should be restorative — it’s an offer of exchange, it should nurture us and enhance us and our soul, somehow. This is so off balance right now in terms of how we understand attention because of the attention economy and the attention presidency.
Thank you so much for your incredibly generous and thought-provoking response, and most importantly, your attention 💫