PAYING ATTENTION
And the perils of not being able to.
If you happen to be sitting in a window seat at the Little Victories coffee shop on Elgin Street, you might notice a small concrete planter on the sidewalk outside. It’s right there, you can see directly into it: some red-petaled flowers, some lettuce-like leaves, some fat knives of grass that might actually be weeds.
There are more interesting things to look at on this particular stretch of Elgin Street: the grand granite arch of the National War Memorial looms over the courtyard; across the way is the National Arts Center, where looping videos of upcoming shows are projected onto the three-storey facade—dancers dancing against pulsating neon patterns, violinists violining like they’re in agonizing pain.
But let’s not look at those things. Let’s not look at our phones, let’s not check our texts. Let’s keep looking at this planter. What do you see?
There’s a sliver of cellophane fluttering among the stems; the shed skin of someone’s morning muffin (or morning pack of cigarettes). The soil is grayish and pebbled; these plants, though carefully arranged, haven’t been watered in a while. There’s a small indentation in the concrete surface of the planter, about the size and shape of a thumb, and you can’t help but wonder: did some Guatemalan factory worker snatch it out of the mold too soon, and were they fired for their mistake?
Who fell out of love with this planter? Who suffered to build it? You could write a novel about this planter. You could make an award-winning feature-length documentary. This planter really has some stories to tell.
By paying attention to this random object, we have made it important. More important than that fifty-foot-tall statue, more important than those half-naked Belgians projected on the side of the building. You might even say that this planter wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t noticed it. By looking at it, we have confirmed its solidity, we have conjured it into existence, we have made it real.
This is the magic of paying attention.
Paying attention might seem like a passive act, but it’s not. It requires exertion. Not just mentally, but physically. To keep your eyes on a thing, you must steel yourself, you must clench. At any given moment of your waking life, you are chest-deep in the ocean, struggling to stay upright as the tides push and pull you. Right now, as you’re reading this, there’s a twitch in your thumb, the words are getting blurry, the tides are compelling you to scroll to the bottom of the page to see where this is all going (spoiler: nowhere), your finger is being dragged towards the back button—back to your inbox, back to your feed, back to The New York Times homepage, where some new catastrophic thing has surely occurred in the five minutes since you were last there.
If you are still here, within this sentence, you are flexing a thousand muscles, you are pushing back against the weight of the world. Paying attention is an act of resistance, the same way you resist the pull of gravity when you lift a dumbbell. It’s exhausting, isn’t it? It makes your muscles burn, it makes you sweat, it takes practice to build your strength.
A ski hill on a Saturday afternoon might seem like an ideal place to build some strength. It’s serene and quiet and when the safety bar locks you into place on the chairlift it’s pretty much impossible to unzip your jacket pocket and pull out your phone. There’s nothing else to do but ride in silence and stare out across the slopes, searching among the tiny gliding figures for your son and daughter, who are out there, somewhere, with an instructor.
At some point you might gaze down between your skis and see the snowbank scrolling by beneath you. It’s littered with gloves and poles and empty aluminum cans. But there’s something else within your field of vision, too: a clear plastic frame attached to the safety bar. Inside that little frame is an advertisement for Scotiabank’s home financing services. Unlock preferred rates!
And suddenly you’re no longer watching for your kids, or wondering who the hell throws empty cans off a chairlift—you’re thinking about your mortgage, and how you have to renew it next year, and wondering what the current interest rates are, how they’re trending, and how, as a responsible homeowner, you really should be paying attention to this sort of thing. Suddenly, you’re reaching across your lap and trying awkwardly to unzip your pocket.
(And while you do this, your kids zip past below, waving in vain to get your attention.)
We possess a finite amount of attention, which is a problem, because there’s never enough to fill all the vessels that need it— all the people (our kids, our parents, our friends), all the books and TV shows and websites and reels and tweets and tasks and chores and errands, all the vital social and political projects that keep our civilization humming along. The world is too vast. There is simply too much to pay attention to.
And yet: our senses are super-keen, our brains are super-efficient, we’re convinced that we can pay attention to it all. And we try. We try so hard. Isn’t that why you bought a smartphone in the first place, so you could live fully in the world, and be a million different places, see a million different things, achieve a million different goals, and be a million different versions of yourself?
And here you are, living fully: standing in the kitchen preparing a Jamie Oliver recipe for Kakavia Soup while listening to a podcast about the filmography of John Carpenter while mentally composing that work email you have to send later, and, while you’re waiting for the broth to simmer, while the phone is here in your hand, you might as well flip over to the New York Times homepage to check up on that catastrophic thing.
It seems like you’re pulling it off, doesn’t it? You’re making a healthy meal, you’re earning your keep, you’re learning about important sociopolitical maneuverings on the far side of the planet—you’re doing a really good job of giving your attention to the million essential things that require it.
But while you’re looking off into the distance at those million things, what might you be missing?
Shhh, listen—what’s that noise?
That sweet droning? That familiar lilt?
Oh, it’s your six-year-old son, and he’s been talking to you this entire time. Standing right there in front of you for the last five minutes, telling you about the game he plays with his pals at recess, how they pretend to be cats who can turn into dinosaurs, how they go on missions to find special rocks, how their home base is the big tree by the edge of the playground. And while he’s been talking, you’ve been nodding along, saying all the right things – oh yeah? really? wow, that’s cool! – but you’re not really listening, you aren’t really paying attention.
There’s just so much to do. There’s just so much to think about. You couldn’t help tuning out. But now you’re wondering: how many of these stories have you only half-heard? How many more reports on his secret life at school will you get before the answer to what he did all day becomes: nothin’.
Let’s blame the algorithm for this. Let’s blame our phones. Let’s blame Zuckerberg and his cabal of Silicon Valley mesmerists. Browse any airport bookstore and you’ll discover: we’re living in an attention-deficit economy, we’ve developed attention-deficit disorders!
Yes, our attention is finite, and the world’s appetite for it is infinite. You don’t need to work in marketing to know the lengths to which governments and companies (and writers hoping to lay the groundwork to promote their future novels) will go to extract, process, and refine your attention. Have you heard, they’ve even started putting ads on chairlifts?
The industrial exploitation of our attention, in its technological complexity and biological consequence, isn’t much different than the exploitations of the earth’s natural resources. And we are beginning to take it just as seriously. It is, we have been told, an existential threat.
But does this crisis feel a little bit familiar? Have we been through this before? Think back to your own childhood, when your ability to pay attention was under threat from spastic flashing of video games and Saturday morning cartoons, when your lack of focus had a name – ADHD – and the cure was pharmaceutical. Think back even further, to the era of your grandparents, when comic books – that Satanic combination of pictures with words – ruined an entire generation’s ability to read. Or even further, when the novel was breaking the brains of young women by luring them into fictional fantasylands and away from their domestic responsibilities.
Let’s go all the way back to the ancient world, where Socrates lamented that written text was ruining our ability to memorize and recite complex ideas, that the act of reading and writing was externalizing our mental processes and ruining our capacity to pay attention to our own thoughts. Two thousand years might separate us, but we have one thing in common with the great philosopher: he also hated that kids were always on their tablets.
If paying attention has always been a struggle, what responsibility do we bear, today, for what we look at? It might feel like we’re victims of modern technological circumstance. It might feel like we have no choice. But we do. Every microsecond that we’re alive and awake, we’re choosing what to pay attention to.
Why are we so bad at it? At what point are we complicit in our own distraction?
In the shower, one morning, you come up with a little thought experiment:
What if you thought about your attention as a sort of currency? What if you could see your balance decline every time you spent ten minutes flicking through reels, or browsing Temu for shoes you’re never going to buy, or watching the same hockey highlights for the third straight time (two teams you don’t even care about, who aren’t even going to make the playoffs). If you could see the massive debts of attention you owe – to your parents, and kids, and friends, and community, to all those household improvements, to all those unfinished art projects – would you suddenly become a penny-pincher? Would you make smarter long-term investments?
Or would you hoard your attention, the way the wealthy are prone to do?
What is the cost, then, of withholding attention? In an attention economy, the nuclear option is to simply ignore a thing, to pretend it doesn’t exist. Ghosting is considered a form of emotional abuse, such is the deep psychological distress being neglected arouses in us. That’s why it’s so hurtful when someone at a party looks over your shoulder when you’re talking to them. That’s why you get so angry when your spouse forgets the thing you just told them to remember. Weren’t you paying attention? Can’t you hear me? Do I not exist?
Yes, the pressure to pay attention can be unbearable. You might seek to alleviate this pressure by getting tickets to see Father John Misty at Massey Hall, and in the weeks leading up, as your attention is subdivided among all the mundane tasks and silly distractions of your day-to-day life, you look forward to the show, a little oasis on the horizon, a moment of peace in which there will be, temporarily, only one thing to pay attention to.
But when the night finally arrives, and you find yourself jostling among hot bodies, watching Josh Tillman strum the first chords of “Real Love Baby” from thirty yards away, what are you thinking about?
You’re thinking you shouldn’t have gotten this third beer, because the third beer always gives you a headache, makes you restless, and you have to be at the office early tomorrow for that marketing workshop. You’re wondering whether the show will really be done by 10:00 pm, or if you should take out your phone and extend your parking. You’re thinking (for some reason) about how you wanted to be an architect, but chickened out the day of your interview because you didn’t think your portfolio was good enough, and where might you be, right now, if you’d just had the courage to try? You’re thinking about the perils of making life-altering decisions at the age of 18.
You’re not really here at the concert, are you? You might as well be listening to “Real Love Baby” on headphones while you fold laundry at home. You’ve paid hundreds of dollars to be here, locked up in this dark hall, isolated from interruption, immune from distraction, and still: you can’t pay attention.
Our attention is a gift that we give—to ourselves, to others. But it can be a weapon, too. Every smothered kid hiding from hovering parents knows it. Every shy guy dragged out to karaoke night knows it. Every girl jogging alone in the early morning hours knows it. Every woman aging into the third act of her life and sensing the world’s waning gaze, going through the slow process of turning invisible—she probably knows it best.
If you pay attention to kids taking swimming lessons, you’ll notice that they’re constantly glancing over to see if their parents are watching. They’re good at it, too. Quick, subtle. It’s hard to catch them, but they’re always doing it. Every seven seconds or so: glance, glance, look, peek, glance.
Most of the parents sitting barefoot beside you at the community pool don’t notice this because they’re not paying attention. They’re hunched over their phones. They’re flicking spastically through news articles, emails, messages, feeds, tapping open random apps and quickly closing them, going back to the articles, the emails, flick, flick, flick. They’re searching aimlessly for something to pay attention to while their kids are checking to see if they’re being paid attention to. And so it goes: glance, flick, glance, flick, glance.
But you’re better than those other parents. You’re actually watching your kids. You wave to them when they glance over. You offer enthusiastic thumbs-ups (even when they’re not glancing, just to prove your point). You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you, for not being one of these bad parents?
But you remember, suddenly, that you never responded to that text from your neighbours about what you’re going to bring to dinner next weekend, and if you don’t make it clear that you’re bringing the guac, what are you going to do with those avocados that have been softening on the windowsill all week? And so, while your kids are at the far end of the pool with their heads underwater, you quickly take out your phone and type your response.
But, of course, inevitably, they saw you do this, and in the car on the way home your daughter complains: “You were on your phone! You’re always on your phone!” To which you will respond, reasonably, maturely, and with no small measure of shame: “Always? Do you even know what always means!?”
Your phone made no sound. Your phone did not, of its own volition, under its own power, crawl out of your pocket and into your hand. Admit it: you got bored, watching your kids doing their thirteenth lap, your mind wandered, you needed a fix of information, you sought the dopamine kick of getting something done, and what price have you paid for it? Your reputation with your kids, now, is that you’re “always” on the phone.
That’s all it takes. One little slip. One little mistake. And now you’re a bad parent, just like the others. Worse than them, because you should know better—after all, aren’t you the one who was staring at that stupid planter for half an hour, bragging about conjuring it into existence, waxing philosophical about the magic of your attention?
Not just a bad parent, but a hypocrite, too.
But you will recover from this trauma. You will be better. You will dedicate yourself to becoming the sort of person who manages their attention responsibly, who spends it on the right things—meaningful things. And once you become this kind of person, the world will reward you in unexpected ways.
For example: you’ll be sitting in your office, one day, looking out onto the stream behind your house, and will suddenly see, through the trees down below, a flash of white wings.
A blue heron is gliding through the forest, and lands at the edge of the water. You step out onto the back deck and watch the tall bird creep upstream in slow-motion. Each lift and bend of its long leg is like some sarcastic dance move. The water tinkles and slurs. It’s lovely. You watch the bird as it watches whatever it’s watching, and you think to yourself: a blue heron really knows how to pay attention.
A blue heron also really likes to take its time, and, after a while, you wonder to yourself: have I watched it for long enough? What is the correct amount of time one must spend watching a rare and delicate scene like this? How much attention must I pay to show my gratitude? What is the exchange rate? One minute? Five minutes? Ten minutes? You begin to fear that you’ve watched it for so long, now, that you’re going to have to watch until the very end, when the heron finally makes up its mind and stabs whatever salamander or millipede is crawling beneath its feet, and that could be another twenty minutes, another two hours. Funny to think that the sunk-cost fallacy applies to your attention, too. You’ve been looking at that heron for too long, now, to look away. What if it does something cool and you miss it?
But the tides are too strong. The to-do list is too deep. You duck back into your office and leave the heron standing there, majestic and patiently waiting for its prey. You can’t help it, your attention is being drawn away, your laptop is calling you back. And for what urgent task? To write down all these deep thoughts about the importance of paying attention.
In the course of a single day, your attention skims like a skipped stone across the ocean: it travels far, but it barely gets wet. And that’s why your day always ends the same way: laying in bed, tossing and turning, hating yourself for all the things you didn’t pay enough attention to—that Blue Heron, that concert, that missed phone call from your dad. You’ll want to distract yourself from these sad thoughts, perhaps by picking up your phone from the bedside table and reading about the latest catastrophe, scrolling some feeds, studying the interest rates. But it’s easy to stop yourself. Because the one thing you’re good at paying attention to is how bad you are at paying attention. And maybe that’s the real magic, the real act of resistance: to catch yourself drifting, to find your footing after the tide knocks you over.
I made it all the way to the end. It was like a little stab in the heart, but damn, that stab felt good. Loved the imagery of a tide. Thank you for your work.
"Isn’t that why you bought a smartphone in the first place, so you could live fully in the world, and be a million different places, see a million different things, achieve a million different goals, and be a million different versions of yourself?"
I specifically got a smartphone to save myself from the mental load of *not* having the encyclopedia of the internet at my fingertips -- which would have saved me from two brain-wracking hours trying to remember the name of actor Robert Loggia pre-mobile access to IMDb. Sure, I could have written it in a notebook and let it go until I was back at a computer, but... it would be faster if the internet were at my fingertips!
And then phones became cameras. And books. And newspapers. And social media became a thing. A lot of burdens and benefits from one small device. But at least I've never struggled to read my writing on a digital note! A small one-up on a paper notebook.
Really thought-provoking piece. Thanks!