The Ecology of Attention

The “soft” characteristics of any kind of contemplative behavior (slowness, eddying, meandering) make it easy to devalue. And this, too: creative space often feels resistant, like it’s denying us something, won’t speak, won’t produce—when in reality it’s just quiet, it’s not dancing for us, or “entertaining,” or feeding us dopamine edibles.

In habitually checking messages, I lost the chance for intimacy with slow dawnings, the feel of big decisions sending down early, tender roots, or green thoughts pushing up through the hard ground of doubt and uncertainty into light.

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.

If I believe my inner world is an “ecology” and social media’s algorithms are “incursions” and “extractive”—then I have to think hard about my own part in sustaining the fragile space of my attention, a place I’ve been cultivating with great care all these years.

Once upon a time, when checking and scrolling were not an option, there existed so much interstitial space. The gap between one activity and another was an open field, a transitional territory.

Here’s what attention lavished on scrolling feels like to me. There’s very little texture, or nap to it—it slides and skids. That brief rise or ping we now know is a jolt of delicious dopamine, feels good and soothing at the outset, but it’s not a sensation that sticks, physiologically or otherwise.

the “elsewhere” of messages, news cycles, TikToks, and so on

What happens in open, fertile space cannot happen anywhere else or by any other means. This in itself feels to me like an occasion for awe, and the more I can preserve this space, which is fragile and requires care, the more I feel I’m touching some kind of potential—my own, the imagination’s.

attention as inner ecology—and then, I could see ways that a holistic system was imperiled. I could see an inner landscape as a patch of thriving rainforest, a complex, interdependent ecology slashed back and stripped bare to accommodate the incursions of an export crop (and as we know, export crops don’t feed the locals). The long-rooted, sustaina... See more