“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”
Thirty five years ago when I was told we’re in the age of information I could hardly contain my excitement. I was discovering the whole world at my fingertips! What a feeling of independence to travel back and re-live centuries long lost and then to explore a world yet to come through the imagination of scientific fiction and experiments. However, they say that a good science fiction writer is not one who predicts the automobile but the one who predicts the traffic jam!
Many years later I need to think of what kind of a jam am I in today? Far from the independence I felt then, I find myself in the grip of media invasion! Many times it feels like I’m running up and down an escalator, not being able to get off…or more accurately ‘switch off’! And, honestly, the real question is, do I want to switch off?!
It’s easy for me to look at teenagers on Snapchat and get exasperated because they’re not paying attention to what I’m saying but I too am in danger of the same. We are now not facing simply a normal anxiety about attention but a serious attention crisis! And one with huge implications on how we live.
A few decades ago, when I was in training for dyslexia correction there were 5% of kids referred as dyslexic….today there is an entire society that suffers from ADD in one symbolic form or another….anxiety tops the list and is the real pandemic.
For me, recognising my own hijacking of attention was the first step. I read and researched how I could help myself and learned that our brain can only produce 1 or 2 thoughts at once…we’re very single-minded.
So, in effect, we have fallen for an enormous delusion that has us believe that we can follow six different forms of social media at the same time….when I’m writing a report, a notification comes, I check it, then I follow it, then check my messages, then check my missed calls and probably call back….keeping on going back and forth constantly juggling attention. Every time we do that the brain has to reconfigure, moment to moment, task to task, even though it seems seemless. This, of course, comes with a very heavy cost…this continuous re-focusing makes us lose 20% of our brain power. According to some scientists we now live in a “perfect storm of cognitive degradation.”
Even when surfing through social media I ask myself, “why do you do this?! Why this itch?” Is it an addiction to the trickle of ‘likes’ and comments that say, “I see you. You matter.” Would my world turn silent without this flood of hearts? And would that silence be so threatening?
Though it must be filled with meaningful activity, as with my therapeutic work, I realise that it’s not enough to just cut out the distractions…that will leave a void…and if there is a void it needs to be filled. And it must be filled with meaningful activity, something you care about…something that will make a significant difference to your life.
The factors harming our attention are not all immediately obvious…it’s never one thing…everything effects everything else. It’s wide ranging too from the food we eat to the way we breathe, to the hours we work and the less we sleep because of it.
By being aware at an individual level we can make many changes in ourselves that will protect our focus. Though lasting and rapid change is at a collective level too. These are early warning signs for us so we are not giving into harassment and manipulation by technology.
I believe the urgency for awareness and action is because the longer we wait the harder it gets, the more our attention degrades and we won’t be able to summon the energy it takes to make this change.
This shift happens at the level of our consciousness…we CAN move away from just blaming the system and honour our own minds and together we can take back our attention from that which is stealing it. Collectively we can start by saying an emphatic “NO” to this theft and a positive “Yes” to our awareness.
Cheers!
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