The Ecology of Attention

The sensation is one of wandering aimlessly, picking up and putting down partly-interesting objects with a sense of generalized indifference. I started noticing something else, too: the impulses powering my behavior weren’t even articulated. The reason for checking and scrolling was rarely in response to an actual inquiry.

The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I w

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That space—where you look up from writing and don’t know where to go or what to do next, where you sit at a red light, wait at the post office? Something lives in that space that’s being hurt and displaced by calling in the “elsewhere” of messages, news cycles, TikToks, and so on. A relationship to something as yet unknown and under formation is be... See more

“What I need, what I am trying to build, is — I coin this phrase by analogy to a memory palace — an attention cottage . ... When I sit down in a chair with a book in my lap, a notebook at my side, and no screens within reach or sight, I am dwelling in my attention cottage.

The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension

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