The Ecology of Attention

But my attention is not free for the taking—it’s mine . And once I felt that my own very precious ground-of-being was overrun and manipulated, once I identified the extractive behaviors I was being recruited for, I could see that I had to exert far more agency. If I believe my inner world is an “ecology” and social media’s algorithms are “incursion... See more

Contemplative space is hard to define. Contemplation is generally not a practice that offers immediate jolts of anything. There’s (well, usually) no chatty/ethery response from on high, no neatly cleared path unfurling after a good long think. In fact, more often it feels like “nothing” at all is happening in that open space. The “soft” characteris... See more

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

Social media’s algorithms, Manifest Destiny style, took the wide-open space of my attention as empty land to be colonized. And to colonize desirable space, land has to be first defined as free, available for the taking. Which means, conveniently, the land has no life, or reason, or desire, unto itself and isn’t already a “home.” But my attention is... See more

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.

scrolling narrows the field of my curiosity. I take what I find there; I don’t make adventurous or consequential inquiries. I used to sit with boredom all the time—oh, I flinched and chafed, but I always found my way out, or around it. In habitually checking messages, I lost the chance for intimacy with slow dawnings, the feel of big decisions send... See more

Scrolling displaces observation, shuts out occasions for self-generated thought, silences out-of-the-blue invitations. Checking the phone reroutes the discomfort of blankness and emptiness. It stoppers authentic—often anxious—waiting.

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 impulse to scroll rem... See more

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.