📿Achtung, Baby!

The average attention span is only 8 seconds?! Thoughts on the Attention Economy. And meditation, of course.

IMAGE ID: Feet. Feet. Puppy Tush. Welcome to my current center of attention.

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Hello you, Adreanna here for this week’s dispatch of The Laundry — 

This week’s practice inspiration is brought to you on behalf of our (nearly) six month old kid — both the topic of this piece and and the brevity of this piece, which is being written around her nap schedule.

We’re in a stage where she needs continual holding and inclusion. If I’m making oatmeal, it’s with her on my hip as I talk her through my actions. This is the water… these are the oats… If I’m doing anything, it’s with her at the center. She is becoming, amongst many things, a living barometer for the quality of my sustained attention. 

In this way, parenthood has been great for my meditation practice, at least the core principles of mindfulness and concentration.  Our kid knows immediately when my focus has flagged from her, even just a little, and she calls me on it through her kicks and screams. She throws a physical protest to being abandoned — which I imagine is what my lapses in attention feel like. Even if my body is with her, she knows when my attention is not, which is painful, and she lets that be known. I’m an adult, and I totally get where she’s coming from. It’s lonely spending time with someone who isn’t present. I find it more lonely than being alone. 

This hasn’t been conducive to writing, however, which ALSO requires sustained attention— but without a kid at the center. It’s been interesting to watch my attention bounce between two activities that require it so fully. Especially with all of the *pings* and beeps of daily life in the background asking for a taste of my attention, too.

Over the years my motivation for keeping a meditation practice going has changed (as I’ve changed) to meet the different phases of life that I’m in. I think this is fairly common when it comes to staying consistent with practice, or staying consistent with anything, really— we might wake up one day and find that the juice, the reason, the purpose for going to sit on our cushion doesn’t genuinely move us anymore. The intention is dusty and stale. I’ve experienced this at least a half dozen times, which is always a sign that it’s time to explore what’s important about practice NOW. 

*One of these days (when I have more time and attention) I’ll write an ode — in the spirit of the Taylor Swift “Eras” Tour — to the many phases that have motivated my meditation practice over the past 20+ years. 

Something that I’ve been currently motivated by is just how important attention — and the ability to pay attention deeply — has become in recent years. There is no shortage of great thinkers who have waxed poetic about the power and beauty of attention. 

There is French philosopher Simone Weil’s often quoted: 

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” 

And bell hooks’ reflection on love: 

“Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.”

There is Mary Oliver’s concise instruction: 

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

And Susan Sontag’s rally cry: 

“Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”

There is also no shortage of contemporary writers who are sounding the alarm on how increasingly fractured our attention spans have become. (Jenny Odell’s bestseller How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy and Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants come to mind.) In an age when information is so cheap that it’s free, and anything can be found on Google, information isn’t the dominant resource that it used to be — now it’s our eyeballs, our clicks, our attention that drives the digital economy. Which means that our attention is highly sought after.

There is a Guest Essay on this topic that was published this week in The New York Times, that has been rattling around in my head since reading it. It was written by members of The Strother School of Radical Attention and opens with a bleak statistic that in the digital age, many of us are only able to hold sustained attention for 47 seconds. (Time Magazine claims research that the average attention span is 8 seconds, so I guess 47 seconds should be celebrated?)

Due to the onslaught of emails, advertising, the news cycle, social media, and screens that go *ping*, the NYT essay proposes that our attention spans are becoming increasing fractured (this tracks with my experience), and that attention education is something that needs to be taught. Or in the case of those of us who were born pre-internet, re-taught. ie: It’s important to learn how to pay attention. Deep attention. Sustained attention. A healthy attention span is no longer the default.

This also tracks with my experience. When I consider WHY I meditate, in this stage of my life — we’ll call it my “Upstate / New Mom / World On Fire / Internet" Era — it’s in part to glue my attention span back together so that I have something whole, robust, sustained AND sustaining to offer myself and the people around me.  I’m simultaneously more nervous about our collective future and more invested in it than I’ve ever been. And if these great thinkers who wax poetic are to be trusted, quality attention is a core ingredient of generosity, vitality, and our connection with others. Attention is something to offer, even when I feel empty handed. 

Speaking of, our kid is waking up from a nap, which means that my full attention is needed. Thank you for reading along with us here — aka: thank you for paying attention. I know, more than ever, just how precious it is. 

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