Pay attention! But to what?

Ignoring things is a great unsung hero of human existence (and I am not just talking about teenagers being asked to get out of bed on a Saturday).  To even read this, for example, you need to ignore how your feet feel at the moment, what you ate yesterday, what your plans are for this evening, and so on.  To even walk across a room without tripping up you need to ignore the patterns of the carpet, the various shadows cast by the light on the tree outside the window, and the book you are reading. Attention is, therefore, a bit like a spotlight – of the vast variety of things we could attend to, it directs our consciousness towards some things, and away from the thing we need to ignore.

Yes, but what to?  The choices are endless

Ignoring things is, therefore, an inescapable part of paying attention – they go together, and they raise some very interesting issues. It’s a particularly important issue, I think, as the quantity of choices we have is so vast these days. Now choice is often a great thing - for people who have no choices, life is almost unbearable; and there is great human value in the move from few meaningful choices (over much of human history, and in many parts of the world today) to many (for many of us today).  But as the number of choices increases, the work of deciding what to ignore gets harder and harder, and once we get beyond a certain point, as Barry Schwarz has said, the danger is that we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

The problem is not, however, solely a modern one; writing in the first century AD, Roman philosopher Seneca asked What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is, not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many. To be troubled by so much information in books now seems quaint; the issue these days is, of course, compounded beyond description by social media, and globalisation in general.

In a 2007 essay, David Foster Wallace has termed total noise as the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective that we encounter today when we try and engage with the world, especially through social media; the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to.  That really seems to resonate with me; the endless feeds, posts, updates, mails, calendar invites, conference notes and so on are in danger of ceasing to be the great source of information they once were, and of turning into distraction.

There are, of course, many things we can do with social media; turn off notifications; unsubscribe; turn off the unread messages count; delete the app from our phone, or even delete our media accounts entirely. That may help, perhaps a great deal, but it’s probably not the root of the problem; which is that we need to pay attention to what we pay attention to.  To use the earlier metaphor, we need to direct the spotlight, and not let it just be automatically pulled to the brightest shiniest thing. Practically speaking should we:

pay attention to grades, or learning?

pay attention to what others think, or doing the right thing?

pay attention to making people laugh, or to being kind?

pay attention to people we are with – friends, children, parents – or the devices we carry?
pay attention to who and how our children are, or what they achieve?
pay attention to what's in our control, or what's not in our control?
pay attention to our own value, or how we compare to other?

I am sure there is a link between where we devote our attention, and our mental health.  To be caught in the tsunami likely means being turned up and down, and spun around – dizzy and disorienting.  I am guessing that’s why the mindfulness and meditation approaches are getting such traction these days.  Author Depak Chopra suggested that the quality of one's life depends on the quality of attention. Whatever you pay attention to will grow more important in your life.    That sounds like wisdom to me and I'll write on it again shortly.

It’s ironic that this problem arises as a result of what is generally a good thing  - increased information, increased choice. But these things come at a cost, and rather than be seen solely as enriching, we should see the danger is that they create a form of poverty.  Herb Simon said it like this:  What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources.

The first step, then, is to pay attention to what we pay attention to.

References

• Foster Wallace, D. (2007) Deciderization 2007 –a special report.
• Seneca. Treatises: On Providence, on Tranquility of Mind, on Shortness of Life, on Happy Life
• Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.
• Schwarz, B (2016) The Paradox of Choice Eco Press: Revised.