Take Control of Your Attention

Take control of your attention.

Do whatever it takes.

The primary obstacle to happiness, love, and everything you want most is the all-out war for your attention.

Social media and video games are incredibly addictive. The news cycle brings us catastrophe after catastrophe. Our email is full of messages we never asked for, from senders like “rotting teeth,” and “Manhood growth,” and “LightSocketSecurity.” We get texts from numbers we don’t know, aiming to entice us: “what are you doing tonight?” Streaming service after streaming service now competes for our time and our money, knowing we desperately need entertainment and distraction, some fantasy to extract us, even for a few moments, from the burning overwhelm of “reality.”

I’m not against distraction, or following the news, or playing video games, or watching reels on social media. Nor am I telling you where to put your attention.

I am telling you that if you don’t learn to take control of your attention, and put it in the places that matter most to you, you are choosing to be victimized. Victimized for the sake of profit, the profit of people who don’t know you, who don’t care about you.

To allow yourself to be victimized in this way is to choose, often unconsciously, a soul-less existence, an existence that is determined by the demands of your environment, not the deeper imperatives of your being.

This is not an accusation. This is simply how powerful people have manipulated less powerful people for eons: create a population that is scared, overwhelmed, distracted, and numb.

Notice I did not say “stupid.” Humans cannot be made stupid. I push back against any narrative that asserts any person or group to be stupid.

Humans can, however, be taught to believe in lies, and to turn away from hard truths, and this is MUCH EASIER to do when they are scared, overwhelmed, distracted, and numb.

Have you noticed that health care and education are crumbling?

That politics– whatever your personal views– now resembles a stampede of animals desperate to avoid the incoming flood?

What about the economy? Housing prices? The morale and health of your community?

Do you feel how a painful sense of isolation, exacerbated by the pandemic and persisting now, continues to be a force of deep sorrow for many?

We can’t stay on top of all those issues, and I’m not suggesting we should.

I am suggesting that exhausted, burnt out humans with fractured attention fail to find agency anywhere in their lives.

I am suggesting we take control of our attention, choose the small handful of things that matter most, and deliberately, over time, keep putting our attention and energy into those things (knowing that we don’t have total control over the outcome).

This moment in history is demanding.

It is demanding we pay attention differently.

It is demanding that we discover who we really are.

It is only by being who we really are that we nourish ourselves and our communities.

To be who you really are: start by taking control of your attention. Stop giving it away without your consent.

Then ask yourself what matters most.