I thought I was going to write more often. Especially since writing the first post felt so fulfilling and rewarding. Now it still sits there, lonely and all by itself on my front page. Almost every day, since my last post in August, I’ve thought about writing or thought about things that would be fun to write about. I set myself deadlines. I tried to structure my week and hold myself accountable. I told people that my new post would come tomorrow (in August) and that it was almost done. And it actually was. I wrote and wrote, but I wasn’t satisfied enough to press that “publish” button.
Ironically, I was writing about compassion and self-compassion while being harshly critical and judgmental of my own work and work ethic. I thought about how I needed to follow the same structure I used in my first post – introducing three different thinkers, one more philosophical, one psychological, and one more pop culturally relevant. I wanted to have an arc to all my posts – a story. They should effortlessly connect and flow into one another. Before even finishing my second post, I managed to stress about how I could turn this into a book and how I could optimize and improve my writing. I read some David Foster Wallace essays and thought “I will never be as good as this guy”. I sat there, thinking all these things, and I didn’t even ever plan on becoming a writer. I just wanted to pick up a new hobby, but like so many of us, I managed to turn a hobby, a possible new passion, into a project measured in productivity and success.
To the philosopher Byung Chul Han, I quickly became the auto-exploiting laborer of my own enterprise – my own slave and master. What started as a small exercise to write more and just have fun, turned into something that made me feel pressured and uneasy. Something that I should perform at. Something I could fail at. I am not alone in this. Perfectionism, especially socially prescribed perfectionism, is on the rise in all Western countries. Luckily, I am a master procrastinator and managed to distract myself from these feelings with all sorts of things. One of them being the sweet relief, the instant soothing pacifier, the instant dopamine hits of the attention economy.
I know, everyone is writing about the attention economy. It might feel redundant to add to the pile of literature, posts, and articles about it, but to me, not addressing it today seems like not recognizing the role of religion in the Middle Ages and thus completely missing the Zeitgeist. Attention, or lack there of, is an issue we are all fighting with to varying extents.
We are all part of the attention economy. It defines the societies we live in. The wise man Dr. Maxi Heitmayer once said that we all define ourselves by consumption, willingly or not – meaning that even if you are anti-consumption, it is an invariable part of your identity. It seems to be similar with social media and other attention miners. If you use instagram it is going to be difficult to not feel defined by your profile. And even if you do not post anything (which is also a conscious choice) you will, at the very least, see a reflection of yourself in “your” algorithm. And if you are now thinking all smug “I am not on Instagram or TikTok”, you are still currently using the internet and presumably for much more than reading my blog. As Bo Burnham sang: “If none of it’s of interest to you – you’d be the first”.
But let’s say you do manage to keep your interactions with the attention economy to a minimum. It is impossible not to make the rejection of the attention economy part of your identity. It is such a conscious decision to not partake – to reject social norms and thus communicate what you stand against. As Bourdieu (thank you, Ben) pointed out – in a post-modern society our distastes and rejections often carry much more weight than our likes and preferences.
While the topic of identity through consumption and social media is an interesting one, I want to focus on the hijacking of attention and its impact on societal and individual potential today.
Simone Weil called attention the “purest form of generosity”. To her, attention wasn’t just a muscle that can be trained, as it is now often described in YouTube videos on “how to regain your focus” and “how to enter the flow state” etc. She saw attention as a state of emptiness and readiness to receive. As a way of suspending your own thoughts and ego and fully focusing on something that is outside yourself. Attention, to her, is generosity, openness, and love much more than it is a tool that can be used to achieve your goals.
Today, we lack both. We lack the capacity for full attention as a form of love and generosity towards the other and ourselves, but we also lack the ability to focus and “pay” attention. Today, our attention is more rarely willingly given and directed. Instead, it is drawn, hijacked and taken from us – (ironically, I got distracted by a notification while writing this). In former times, even books were sometimes seen critically as ways of escaping your own thoughts and reality.Today, however, we struggle picking one up, because we have the phone as a more convenient option. Furthermore, there is a constant fight for our attention – and the book on our bedside table is not fighting. What’s more, the book is difficult to engage with. It doesn’t reel us in with a notification – it just lies there. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Snapchat however – they want us, they want our attention and they show it to us through notifications and carefully curated content.
And why is that? Well, one reason is that the book is already sold. If publishers and authors were paid by the time we spent reading books, instead of when we buy them, we might have different mechanisms trying to figure out how to captivate our attention for the next chapter. The attention economy, however, is an ad-driven model. Nobody pays for the service, but in this techno-feudalist system, companies pay for the finite resource of your attention to sell stuff to you – and big tech is selling it. With attention being the new currency, tech companies try to keep you on your screen for as long as possible because they have no responsibility except to their shareholders.
Now you may say, “just don’t check your phone every time a notification pops up”. However, most of our smartphone interactions (89%) are initiated by ourselves, rather than a response to a notification. Whether these are intentional or compulsive uses, often we get sucked into whichever app we are using and escape from reality into a world often seen as even more real, or to borrow from Baudrillard “hyper-real”. Bo Burnham provokingly expands on this thought in his special “inside”:
“… The outside world, the non-digital world, is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much-more real, much-more vital digital space. One should only engage with the outside world as one engages with a coal mine: Suit up, gather what is needed, and return to the surface.”
While you might not agree with this depiction of reality, we seem to be moving towards it – with rising screen times across the world, an epidemic of loneliness, and AI “brain rot” content racking up millions of views on TikTok. It captures it perfectly: I’d rather see an AI slop video of a shark wearing sneakers while waiting for the bus than engage with my environment or my own thoughts. The “returning to the surface” helps us to not have to sit in our own discomfort and anxiety, to be safe in the controllable and predictable space of the apps of our choosing and to not have to engage with the “other” and the non-digital world.
Byung Chul Han described the smartphone as a sort of “transitional object”. These objects provide a feeling of safety in times of emotional turmoil – e.g. for children when growing up – and are also used in therapy to help with emotional regulation. In the same way children have a blanket or favorite toy that gives them comfort, we now have the smartphone available in our pocket, ready to provide comfort and escape at a moment’s notice. The difference is, the child eventually outgrows their need for these transitional objects, while we carry ours around in our pockets at all times. And these objects do not only provide comfort – they also exhaust us with an excess of positivity. We get overwhelmed by a flood of information and symbols that to Han can be described as “violence of positivity”. It does not deprive, but instead saturates. It does not exclude, it exhausts.
With our attention becoming a commodity, we, as a society and as individuals, are losing. We are losing our focus. We are losing our capacity to connect. We are losing potential, and we are losing culture.
I have so much more to say. I could probably tie this together a lot better and expand on how exactly we are losing our culture and potential, but I will just leave that as a little homework for my capable readers to think about.
I am also using this as an opportunity not to overthink my writing and not to polish it to the point where I am unhappy with it again.
Next Post is going to be reflections on the conference “Transform Trauma” that I attended in Oxford recently. The drafts are (of course) already written.
Talk to you soon. This was fun.
Mats
Inspiration and References:
- Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation
- Simone Weil – Gravity and Grace
- Byung Chul Han – Burnout Society
- Maxi Heitmayer – The Second Wave of Attention Economics
- Bo Burnham – “Inside” on Netflix
- Pierre Bourdieu – Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Leave a Reply to Ben Murphy Cancel reply