attention

This rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, I'm going to argue, a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism.

The

Skillful management of attention is the indispensable condition of the good life and the key to improving every aspect of your experience.. What do you choose to focus on, and what do you choose to ignore? Attention defines your life in many ways. 

What we need to survive is more than mere attention: we need care. But attention is a necessary precondition for care. In this way, we are creatures whose very survival depends on attention. We perish in neglect. As part of that inescapable inheritance, we will forever be invested in other people paying attention to us. We are creatures that pay

The experience of boredom is contingent. It is culturally, socially, and institutionally produced…Our age features a set of technologies and social conditions that work together to maximize our boredom if we are not constantly diverted from it.

The Sirens Call

Attending to people and having them attend to us is our normal state of being. Social attention is like sunlight for a plant: we needed to live. It warms and nourishes us. We stretch toward its presence; we shrivel in its absence.

The Sirens Call

The discomfort of giving ourselves over to meaningful activities is what leads us towards distraction (Sacasas)

All greatness in the world consists largely of mental self-control. What we call the life of man consists simply of the stream of consciousness of the succession of images he allows to come before his mind. It is in our power to direct and choose our stream

Irving Fisher