Declaring Attention Bankruptcy
Back to school means time to hit reset and retool.
Even though our kids are longer in school, this time of the year still feels like a good time for a fresh start. In my CPG days, we called it “Back to School” (or BTS, on our comms flowcharts; Which bumped right up to Key Baking Season, or KBS). We knew most of our customers would be going through a reset at home as the summer schedules give way to school schedules, new routines would get grooved, and households would scramble to find a new rhythm.
A lot of families actually used this time as a chance to make new routines while letting go of some old ones. It wasn’t quite New Years Day, but the insights we had indicated a surprising number of folks used “back to school” as a time to “get it right” before the year ran out.
Attention Bankruptcy
This fall, I need to get my head out of the buzzsaw of our modern media landscape.
I need reboot my attention. I have creative and business related projects I want to push forward, but those are at risk because it’s too easy to distract me.
I might need to declare bankruptcy and reorganize.
Focus feels impossible right now. I’m swimming in attention debt.
I’m finding it difficult to look away from the shit-flooded zone in Washington and the profoundly sad news happening in my town.1
We are getting pulled into a semi-urgent-crisis mode with the strangest stuff2 and that’s just what everyone - the administration, fundraisers, the media, “influencers”, podcast hosts, tiktok - wants us to feel. The attention economy is based on maximizing our anxiety to hold our attention. Our attention leads to their money. They’ll do what it takes - lie, exaggerate, misconstrue, redirect - to keep hold of our eyes.
All this “greatness” and “winning” is grinding down our empathy. At least it’s grinding down mine. And, its keeping us distracted from the actual important issues: National deficit, tax policy, healthcare reform, term limits, the gerontocracy in government.
I know my constant news ingestion isn’t really helping me in any way. Yes, I feel like I’m an informed citizen. And, sure, good citizenship requires being informed. But…
My strategic cortisol reserves are depleted.
For too many of us, our default mode has become worry, anxiousness, distraction. We’re numbed. Dumbed down. Lulled and complacent.
The Power of Literature and Artists to Help Us See
Just when I needed it, I ran across a thought provoking essay about David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” address at Kenyon, written by Michael J O'Connell. The article is centered on AI and how it isolates us, and how the humanities offer us ways to work against that isolation. But, i’d argue your could swap out AI with “gamified media saturation” and the article will hold up. And, it served to point me back at the DFW talk.
DFW could see what television and the internet was going to do to us. Though he focused more on the narcotic effect of endless entertainment, he had a sense of how some algorithmically juiced media would fracture consensus and ultimately lead us into a dead end of isolation, loneliness and numbness. He knew how easy it would be to check out, how much we’d want it.
Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.3
I think that meaningful death he refers to is the death of our humanity. What dies is empathy, compassion, good will, connection. The desire to go out into the world and interact. The things we we actually need to flourish: each other, in community, helping each other, perhaps even working for common good.
Meanwhile, the notifications don’t stop. The screens blink. The alerts will always be there.
How might we get free of the relentless pull towards the headlines?
Its hard work to pull ourselves away from the spectacle, from the constant jump cuts in the edit, the calls to action, the exaggerations, the dark patterns. It requires a choice to focus on the real world and the people around us, not just the screens that show a simulation of life, edited and masked for max engagement. And the discipline to stay committed to that choice.
Its worth it, though. Wallace again:
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I actually do have a gnawing sense that I’ve lost something: My ability to concentrate deeply, to do deep work. And, then, to appreciate the way the work connects to the real world.
The humanities - whether its history, literature, music, visual arts, dance, sculpture, collage, photography, whatever - gives us a chance to actively practice the critical skills required to stay human in a world that wants us (needs us) to be passive watchers.
O’Connell shares this quote from This is Water:
I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
It takes discipline to work against the isolating forces of a noxious, all encompassing media fog, to get out of our own head and all the anxieties. But we can build that muscle by going deep into the humanities. Again, from O’Connell:
Knowing how to classify a particular piece of art, or which general led which particular military action, or how to scan a poem, may not matter all that much in the long term. But the kind of discipline and attention it takes to learn and master the facts and skills required in any given subject will have lasting significance in a person’s life.
Its not just learning how to think critically. Its getting better at managing our own attention - what we literally focus on - and knowing what to let simply pass through our awareness without taking it up. Its appreciation. It’s respect and, yes, love for beauty and art. And, humanity. All that sounds too lofty, but f it. I’m ready for aspiration.
The Reboot
I’m not giving up on my attention. I am going to work on rebuilding it. My plan for the rest of the year.
Less: I’m recommitting to less general “news.” Less linkedin (for now). I’ve wiped my podcast app and I’m paring back. Less TV. Less gossip, less conjecture, less arguing, less complaining, less sarcasm, less intentional irony. Less sitting back and letting headlines wash over me.
More: Time with friends. More music. More physical books. More writing, more making music. More hands on. More classics. More making meals for people I want to be with.
I’m going to donate time and money to good causes. I’m going to vote every goddamn chance I get.
And, a big public pronouncement: I want to finish Infinite Jest in 2026.
Finally
Its easy to ask, with all the shit going on, how can I write anything at a time like this? I don’t have a great answer for this, currently. But, writing, to me, is thinking. Thinking is attention. Attention is power. And, right now, this might be the only power I have that’s useful.
I had this essay mostly written last week, before the horrific shooting in Minneapolis. It is, like all the school shootings, profoundly sad but it is especially so because people I know have been personally affected in all the ways you’d imagine. It’s close to home in all the senses.
There are just too many guns and they are too easy to get, legally and illegally. It’s just so obvious.
I grew up hunting with my dad and brother. I love shooting skeet. I think the 2nd amendment is critical, but not sacred. It’s not either/or. It was meant to protect us from tyrants, but now we have to protect ourselves from each other.
We can’t go backwards in time, but reasonable people have to see we as a society have to make changes to how arms are bought and sold. There has to be a sensible middle path through both sides of the gun control argument. But, our politicians are cowards. They’ve given up on job #1: Create a safe, healthy place for children to grow up.
Don’t get me started on f’n Cracker Barrel. Or seed oils and MAHA and brain worms. Or that celebrity engagement. And, seriously? Without tariffs we’re a “third world country”? That’s all it takes to lose “greatness”? 250 years and now we’ll crumble without the tariff grift? So much for leadership and inspiration. The BS coming from these goobers is astounding.
Yes - We are getting pulled into a semi-urgent-crisis mode! It's totally paralyzing and disorienting!!
Yes to you rebuilding your attention and doing the things that matter most.
Looking forward to seeing you soon.
First photo caption might be the best I've ever read! 😂