Draft Four: Stop gifting your attention

The hard work of focus. The focus on the hard work.

We have 15 seconds left.

Then you might leave, studies say.

If this was YouTube, you’d see me pleading after 8 seconds: don’t go.

We have almost twice the time here, in text. Still, half of you could go.

The wars for our attention are scenes of carnage.

Shit, we’re at time.

Please stay?

*

I won’t be long today: 1.000 words, no side dishes, clipped sentences.

Not just for your benefit. Sustaining attention is like putting together glass shards for me, too.

I am reading a new novel by a Russian-born American writer I 💙. Gary Shteyngart. Irreverent, fancy-watch lover, worth it.

Vera, or Faith is the book. It’s about a brilliant 10-year-old who thinks too much, and reads too much, and is too much of an adult. She wants to keep her family together. She’d have figured out what to do if her father snuggled a co-worker on the Coldplay jumbotron.

The book is 23 chapters. Each a 10-minute light lift. It’s why I chose it; I can down two before bed and say it was healthier than TikTok.

Apparently I chose to read a book because it promised it won’t be hard. And it wouldn’t require much attention.

*

I was running when that thought occurred. Running sometimes brings in truth from the unconscious. It pointed out I’m holding on to what matters to me – reading, writing, building complex projects – almost against myself.

It’s July, I know. Bucharest is melting. Trees collapse in vengeful thunderstorms. So many Internet dramas prolonging every toilet run.

Attention deficit is not new. But it hurts more now.

Our attention is slipping, owned and commoditized by social media corporations, harvested by algorithms trained for persuasion, morals be damned. It’s gotten so bad that even when we lack agitation, we’ll create it because we’re addicted to interruptions.

I learned of the paradox of least effort. Interruptions promise ease and distraction. Perfect for a species optimized to seek shortcuts, even when they are bad for us. Yet, hard is meaningful. Studies show we’ll even choose hard over doing nothing (and report feeling better).

Can we still choose hard? A book with fewer chapters? Walking to a restaurant instead of ordering? Building services, not slashing funds? A day un-memed? A week outside the content bathtub?

*

I’m not trying to be cute or rhetorical. I am confused and tired.

Memories of many worthwhile experiences are of effort. Reporting a story for weeks. Reading dozens of papers before writing. Sketching an outline for a day.

I didn’t want to be a journalist who “loved having written”. It’s why love of process came naturally. Journalism was carpentry. The piece got better at each stage. Not in a perfectionist haze, but with deference to effort. Extra reporting made it better. Revision made it better.

Today, I fantasize about easy. A day for an outline? Fuck this. ChatGPT, you free?

My brain is deadass sabotaging me: no time for effort, boss. Not worth it. Pick “good enough”. Keep scrolling. Nothing lasts anyway. The world burns at the rate of 60-second Insta stories. And it’s the first three seconds of those that matter, anyway.

*

My phone is on do not disturb as I write. Face down, arm’s length away. I still I pick it up 50+ times a day.

Instant gratification is low on effort, but it’s also low on meaning.

I know this, and still can’t help it. This is the brainrot express to apathy. No friction means no space for self-regulation, no buffer for thinking and choosing better.

Who wins at this game? Those who win at attention. And most attention winners over-index on outrage. I hate being depleted by attention vampires, from autocrats, to influencers, to trolls exploiting our fragility. And a warning about today’s attention economy: it’s not a by-product of power, but a precursor.

*

Reminder: friction is where growth happens.

That elusive spot between your skills and the difficulty of the assignment. The thrill of your first 10K, after having mastered the 5K. You believe you can do it, but you never have before. It’s hard. A kind that needs mental bandwidth to generate action, and maintain focus.

It needs space, quiet.

But can you afford them, financially?

If you can, and you are still choosing to amuse yourself to death, you do you. (Hypernormalization is ruinous.)

If you can’t, we have a system failure.

A system benefitting from out frazzled attention. Keeping us hooked to distractions. Keeping us bouncing gig to gig in a state of constant anguish and precarity. FOMOed to exhaustion.

Living in a precarity of money, which all but guarantees precarity of time, which creates a precarity of focus.

A teacher said in a survey we’re running for a project on cost of living: I barely make enough for the month. “I can’t give back to my community, who needs resources even more. I hate having to focus solely on myself”.

A lack of resources is a lack of attention to the world outside of the self.

This is the dangerous cost of our precarity of attention: the world around us dims.

*

First, we need stability. Some, because of privileges, can generate more of it. We have a responsibility to do so, and extend this platform to others.

Others need a safety net. Once the precarity if gone, we can do some mental hygiene – I don’t need science to perfectly prove the phone has won; I feel it.

Second, moderation. Fewer pick-ups, less socials, less attention gifted to nihilists.

Stability, moderation, and then doing the hard stuff. The things we say we want to do but put off.

The hard work of focus. And the focus on the hard work.

Plus patience and the discipline to take pleasure in the process. To finish things.

Sometime later: meaning. At least that’s the story. But it’s a better one than believing you have to read through whatever life you have left a 5-minute chapter at a time.