The word religion comes from Latin relegere , which means to “go over again”, to “carefully observe”. Religion, in its purest sense, is not about dogma, rites, monasticism, or indoctrination; it’s about attention.

She isn’t religious in the traditional sense; she’s not part of an organized religion, she doesn’t follow the principles of a denomination, she doesn’t believe in spirits. But, she’s religious in the way that her days form an ongoing ritual of demonstrating her values, and it shows in her cooking, sewing, and dancing.

If you constantly feed yourself gossip, you become suspicious. If you feed yourself beauty, you grow more sensitive to it. Attention is the mouth of being, and what you choose to focus on forms the diet of your becoming. It’s not a coincidence that taste is the only bodily sense that has been adapted to mean preferences: the way your attention... See more

The point of exercising focus is not perfection, what matters is the daily return and the refusal to let attention scatter. The point isn’t to dissociate or detach yourself from desires—it’s the opposite. It’s to attach yourself to a goal so firmly that distractions no longer matter. It’s to care about one thing so adamantly that noise is no longer... See more

Just like your body digests food and turns it into cells and tissues, your attention digests the things you focus on and turns them into thoughts, habits, and eventually, a way of being.

The point of exercising focus is not perfection, what matters is the daily return and the refusal to let attention scatter.

That’s why attention is measured in payments: it’s costly to pay attention because to reach toward one thing is to withdraw from others. We call it the attention economy because it, too, abides by the law of scarcity.