Spiritual Awakening and Creative Destiny in the Attention Economy
Thoughts on wisely investing attention in a world designed to waste it
In an article last spring for The Atlantic, Megan Garber argued that, in the words of her sub-headline, “resisting distraction is one of the foundational challenges of this moment.”1 Fueled by Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again (2022), Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), and Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016), Garber observes that one of the defining phenomena of the present sociocultural moment is the multitude of competing stories and narratives, representing a variety of interests and viewpoints, that constantly vie for our attention and focus. In sync with the insights of media ecology, she says this situation is fueled — and more than that, enabled; and more than that, rendered inevitable — by digital technology and its most prominent daily point of interaction with our individual and interpersonal psychic lives, social media. Garber quotes Odell’s contention that the problem is not just the internet but “the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.”
The line in the article that most arrested me and brought the matter home was this: “Attention is zero-sum; that makes distraction a potent weapon.
Attention is zero-sum. I think this hit me so hard because it’s something I have been realizing and working with myself over the past two to three years. Starting sometime before the advent of COVID-19, I have increasingly recognized, with a deep sense of conviction, that my fund of attention is limited. What I choose to attend to, the objects of my focus, all crowd up against each other and compete for dominance. In terms of my online life, if I call up Twitter, scroll through my feed, read a tweet, click a link, then skim/read an article or watch a video, and then return to click “like” or leave a comment — am I better off than I was before? Was the return on investment worth it? Because that’s how I’ve come to view the whole attention economy: as a matter of personal, spiritual, and creative/daemonic ROI. Attention is an investment. Am I receiving back from it what I really want and need, something truly valuable and worthwhile? Or am I just squandering it?
“In the attention economy, attention is an investment. Am I receiving back from it something truly valuable and worthwhile? Or am I just squandering it?”
These questions raise two others:
If it is advisable to invest one’s attention cautiously and deliberately, then what about the relaxed, open, spontaneous type of attention that forages exuberantly through the world and thus opens itself to creative serendipity? Does deliberately minding and controlling my attention cut this off?
By what principle am I judging my return on attentional investment? What is the core value that determines whether a given investment is wise or foolish?
For the first, Garber addresses this nicely when discussing Odell’s book:
Odell . . . is not opposed to distraction as a very broad category. An artist as well as a writer, she spends much of the book celebrating the value of wandering minds. They are sources, after all, of creativity and curiosity. But there is a stark difference between being open to distraction and being driven to it. (Doing nothing, in Odell’s analysis, is not the absence of action; it is an act of reclamation. It is an attempt to make free time again.) The challenge is to wander mindfully. (my emphases)
To wander mindfully. That, as they say, is the ticket: to adopt an intentional practice of wandering, foraging, ambling idly and widely in a space where your senses are alive and your mind and creativity are simultaneously awake and protected from the weaponized distraction of the contemporary social, cultural, economic, and political order.
This point leads directly into the second: In my own life, I have come to measure whether a given investment of my time, focus, and attention is wise or foolish by considering its beneficial or harmful effects on the dual values of spiritual awakening and creative destiny. My personal spiritual direction is that of nonduality in an Advaita-Zen-Christian-Taoist form, so on this count anything that dulls my drive for awakening from the dream of separation represents attention ill-spent. As for creative destiny, this is the realm of the daemon muse, and thus any investment of my time, focus, and attention that serves to dampen and diminish my inner relationship with this creative source is likewise a bad idea.
In truth, the whole thing is strikingly akin to Susannah Wesley’s classic advice to her son John, the founder of Methodism, on how to judge the advisability of indulging in certain pleasures:
Would you judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure; of the innocence or malignity of actions? Take this rule,—Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind; that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.2
In terms of tending one’s relationship to the inner creative source, we might recast this as follows: If you want to judge the advisability or inadvisability of investing your attention in something, the potential value or harm of it, apply this rule: Whatever weakens your creative flow, impairs the intimacy of your relationship with your inner genius, obscures your sense of the daemon muse, diminishes your relish for pursuing your art; whatever increases the authority of worldly dissipation over focused fulfillment of your creative destiny, that investment of time and attention is wrong for you, however innocent it may seem in itself.
For application to spiritual awakening, Ms. Wesley’s advice needs no recasting, though some moderns with a distinct dislike for traditional Christian terminology may balk unnecessarily at her use of the word “sin,” which refers simply to a “missing of the mark,” a false or mistaken way of being that rests on the unsound foundation Jesus talked about in his parable of the house built on sand, which means it will eventually, inevitably collapse, so why not find out now what reality really is and shift one’s base onto that firm foundation?
In my own life, I have come to measure whether a given investment of my time, focus, and attention is wise or foolish by considering its beneficial or harmful effects on the dual values of spiritual awakening and creative destiny.
In short and in sum, the return on investment that I’m looking for when I carefully manage my attentional investment is enhanced spiritual clarity combined with enriched and empowered creative flow. (The fact that these two macro-goals may sometimes stand in tension with each other is something I will probably address in future entries here.)
It probably goes without saying that I don’t always live up to my own advice. For entire spans of months, I fail at it wretchedly. I find myself falling down rabbit holes of empty, manipulative garbage on the internet and elsewhere. I spend hours or days feeling scattered, distracted, and — in a strange fusion of seemingly irreconcilable moods — irritable and ghostlike. Then, eventually, I come to my senses, return to awareness, recalibrate, and determine to do better next time. And of course “next time” really means this time, always right here in the eternal present moment.
This is a discipline that I have slowly, clumsily, and definitely trained myself to undertake. And I certainly recommend it to others.
Megan Garber, “The Great Fracturing of American Attention,” The Atlantic, March 5, 2022.
Adam Clarke, Memoirs of the Wesley Family (London: J & T Clarke, 1823), 270.
Thank you for these thoughts. I've found myself at a strange standstill of late—desiring to pursue my creatives, but finding a siren call of distractions, that I don't even enjoy, clouding the mind and pulling me in so many directions that in the end I become frozen in place and do nothing.