attention, focus, agency

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

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

Being in proximity to these works reminded me that awe-inspiring creations are not just made by professionals or masters of the past, but by ordinary humans like you and me, who dare to dream up strange, whimsical, improbable things and bring them into the world, not because they serve any practical utility, but because they delight, move, and... See more

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.

Almost anything that we are able to direct sustained attention at will begin to loop on itself and bloom.

To take a dark example, if you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.

And you do the same thing with joy. If you... 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