What We Talk About When We Talk About God
Our attention is sacred. It’s an act of worship in itself. An act of spiritual, mental, and emotional formation. When you give something your attention – a movie, a conversation, a project at work – you’re declaring it the most important thing in your life. It may sound dramatic, but at its core, it’s true. When you pay attention to something, you’
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phoebe added
How we allocate our attention defines us even more than our purchases do. People have different amounts of money, so the things we buy don’t reflect values in the same way for everyone. The same purchase might represent a tremendous sacrifice for one person and a mere afterthought to another. But we all have the same widow’s mite of attention to distribute among the many things competing for it: family, friends, education, health, careers, church, politics, great books, lousy books, clickbait headlines, and viral posts about ridiculous people doing ridiculous things for no particular reason. Our limited attention budget forces us to make choices, and those choices both reveal our values and create our characters.
Attention is all we have. According to philosopher Simone Weil, it is sacred — the rarest form of generosity:
“Attention alone, that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears, is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it onto that which cannot be conceived.”
Alex Dobrenko` • switching to a "dumb" phone made me feel pretty dang smart
Parker C and added
The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Alex Wittenberg and added
What is attention for? Attention is taken up as a capacity that is being diminished by our technological environment with the emphasis falling on digitally induced states of distraction. But what are we distracted from? If our attention were more robust or better ordered, to what would we give it? Pascal had an answer, and Weil did, too, it seems t... See more
theconvivialsociety.substack.com • Attending to the World
Alex Wittenberg added
Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character—a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and it’... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Alex Wittenberg and added
So here is a proposition for you to consider: you and I have exactly as much attention as we need. In fact, I’d invite you to do more than consider it. Take it out for a spin in the world. See if proceeding on this assumption doesn’t change how you experience life, maybe not radically, but perhaps for the better. And the implicit corollary should a... See more
L. M. Sacasas • Your Attention Is Not a Resource
Alex Wittenberg added