Post #188: The Attention Horror Show

5 July 2025

     That we should speak of paying attention is quite apt: the way we do it, cautiously or carelessly, frugally or in the manner of spendthrifts, with discernment or utterly without discrimination (now that the very word has been discredited in all its innocence), will determine not only the incentives for others, but also our own quality of life. The hero and the saint, the sage and the philosopher, stand apart from the mass of mankind not least by what they choose to pay attention to, and what not.

     For ordinary human beings, and for a few extraordinary ones too, there is nothing very new under the sun, then, about seeking attention and giving or sharing it with others on our various human terms. Yet, surely there has been a dramatic transformation in recent times: what for thousands of generations was exchanged locally and intermittently, often with considerable attention spans, has been shortened more and more noticeably, while at the same time getting expanded almost beyond belief into a kind of virtual Colosseum, seating millions, where once human beings would have gathered for their exchanges on makeshift wooden stages in small groups.

     Such is the sound and fury surrounding us on all sides as soon as we press the requisite buttons, such the clamoring for our attention everywhere at once, and such the relentlessness of the onslaught, that one might almost be tempted to speak of a cognitive war of all against all. Outright death may remain rare, granted, but casualties there are frequently enough. What is more, the sheer scope and intensity of the mayhem has been scaled up so ferociously and so quickly that there has scarcely been time to build up viable defenses around what we might wish to protect and preserve. Thus it may be that the life of homo sapiens, after the digital deluge of the past few years, really can no longer be compared to how things were before, and not for the obvious better either.

     Even the most intimate settings, previously screened from attention-prying, are now cracked open not so much by spying (though that cannot be wished away either), but via millions of voluntary surrenders by the phone-addled. No dinner is too intimate or consequential to keep the little black boxes out of sight, and one imagines that they now intrude even upon state visits and royal audiences. Phones are among the most prominent wedding guests everywhere, and probably the very nights that go with them cannot pass any longer without due recourse to the third and fourth parties to any conjugal relationship—I mean not the inner children symbolized by the ring-bearers in traditional ceremonies, but Mr and Mrs Smartphone, the alter egos of the contracting parties to all nuptials in our brave new world.

     A good look behind the high walls of the Vatican and through the fences of monastic communities around the world would offer another instructive, possibly quite disillusioning, angle on how far the electronic scattering of attention has already advanced, with no end in sight so far as today’s eye can see. One is not even shocked anymore to realize that prisons (though porous) and casinos (though parlous) are now some of the last corners where restrictions on phone usage retain real bite. Similar measures may gradually be arriving at schools (penitentiaries of sorts to some, wheels of fortune to others) but as yet they remain far behind, at least from what I can tell based on doleful personal experience at the supposedly tertiary level (not to be confused with “the third degree,” though there can be regrettable parallels).

     Let me say it again: as a central human currency, the value of attention is probably as old as human community itself. Surely we all enjoy, to a point at least, the chance to bask in the favorable or even admiring attention of others. To be disregarded, ignored, or slighted, on the other hand, will be experienced almost invariably as agonizing; where it is not so, someone has either risen considerably above, or fallen considerably below, the human standard. That the regard of other human beings would also have its concrete rewards, some quite precious, whether they come in the form of material goods or status, is nothing novel either. Consider, however, the staggering stakes for which this old game is now played—that is to say, how everything changes when we move from a world in which being much-noticed meant being visible to hundreds or maybe thousands, or very rarely hundreds of thousands, to a global free-for-all in which followings for the most inane and previously obscure nonsense can run in the millions, perhaps in the tens and hundreds of millions on occasion.

     The financial fortunes being won in this manner beggar belief; what effect all this ado might have on someone when it goes to the head, especially at an early age, is anyone’s guess, and not for the faint of heart to contemplate. Still more troubling is the possibility that in the transition to the new dispensation, bad publicity may have lost much of its meaning, inasmuch as the imperatives of being noticed, for better or for worse, are trumping whatever else we may still be able to muster by way of good taste or good sense. “All eyes on me,” seems to be the new motto, and if others can only be induced to look in sufficiently large numbers, it does not seem to matter much anymore whether there is anything worth seeing.

     For the first time too, we now have before us cohorts of the young, barely grown up to a precarious early adulthood, who have never known any other world than one in which the universal attention-contest is conducted in this no-holds-barred style, all around the world with minor variations. Indeed attention-seeking in this most aggressive of modes has ceased to be a bizarre curio and has become a kind of birthright for the young—a posture equally infantile and jaded that has been much aggravated by a deadly combination of too much wealth with too few births, hence far too much adult fussing and fawning and attempted forming or pressing into desired shapes. (A design regularly disappointed, of course, as ever more brattish peers trump the influence of generally well-meaning parents who are in over their heads, by the very nature of the undertaking, and who learn their belated lessons, if ever, barely in time to be grandparents, which may never happen in view of current birth rates.)

     On these tenuous wings do the most meretricious “influenzas” (an equally hideous term, but truer to the phenomenon than the prevailing spelling) rise from the cultural ashes to unimagined heights of fame and fortune, sometimes in a single season when barely out of their teens, or not even that—this only about as frequently as lottery winners, granted, but visibly enough to leave a wide cultural mark in a world whose attention is systematically redirected from more or less typical cases to the most anomalous exceptions. Is it any wonder if the young are misled, nay seduced, by these specious exemplars into believing that they too may rightly aspire to so seemingly charmed a life? To say nothing of the masses of more everyday gamblers who find in the grand bazaar of online shamelessness and idiocy a plethora of opportunities for ill-gotten (though often legal) gains that relieve them of the indignities involved in having to get and hold down a regular job, heaven forbid (#139). To say that they live well as a result wouldn’t strike quite the right note; but let it be freely admitted that they do often manage to make themselves far more comfortable than the ordinary working stiff sweating away at some honest toil.

     Things have come to such a pass that it might well be questioned why anyone should labor at a calling anymore, or at any kind of regular employment for that matter, when it is possible to make a more commodious living by playing internet poker, or what is much the same, by placing meaningless but lucrative bets on market noise, or finding some other random internet cash-cow to milk. “Because,” the earnest may answer in protest, “there are questions of character and contribution at stake that such activities leave unanswered!” Fair enough, except that such a rejoinder is not likely to gain much traction with the crowd in question, and perhaps not altogether unreasonably either, when we recall with a shudder what a bane on the species the rife idiocies and cruelties of working life have meant since our expulsion from Eden.

     Perhaps, one day, there will come a turnaround, if only because we have sunk so low that we cannot descend any further. Alas, the race to the bottom is a long and protracted one, and whether there really is a downward limit remains to be seen. For now it seems that we can easily keep up the process of deterioration: if FaceBook was bad and Twitter was worse, TikTok has plumbed unexpected new depths, and one would have to be very naïve indeed to believe that whatever comes next is likely to reverse direction or at least mitigate a little the cultural brain damage that has already been done, and that may well be too cognitively entrenched by now to be reversible.

     Just as we may find ourselves laughing against all better judgment at something we find distasteful and deplorable, or even outright reprehensible, so we may often be unable to avert our gaze from a screen that is flickering at us. For as long as there have been cars, accident sites have been notorious for catching the eyes of drivers-by, whether they really wanted to look or not. And how many eateries and watering holes of middling repute have not, for decades already, been covering up what they otherwise lacked by using TV-screens as siege engines from which the assaulted parties may well wish protect themselves, but whose incessant attacks their sensory apparatuses simply cannot fend off for long. The manipulation of our attention in this manner is familiar enough; it’s the level of targeted cognitive swamping that should fill us with concern, at least, if not dread or horror.

     The aforementioned saints and sages that stand apart from the common run of distracted mankind have ever preached that a life well-lived (with a modicum of discernment and insight into the true nature of things) depends on cultivating two crucial pillars of wisdom. First, the abiding recognition, again and again, until it finally sticks, that I am not, contrary to what my senses keep insinuating, the center of the universe—indeed that I am not even (upon closer inspection) the robust entity that I appear to be, but rather a process more than a thing, and at any rate much more interwoven with the fabric of the universe than I normally like to tell myself. And second, that in order to arrive at any measure of peace and mental composure in the world, one must learn, above all else, to direct one’s attention consciously and deliberately towards objects that deserve it, rather than either letting it run off willy-nilly wherever it might like to go, or, what is even worse, letting it get dragged wherever others would like to take it, often for highly suspect motives, because they have figured out how to push buttons that we find hard to resist owing to how we are wired, whether we like it or not.

     To stay out of the cognitive quagmire that threatens us on all sides, we must do a lot more than make a choice: we must make a determined and sustained effort to go against not only the currents, but the tides and storm waves of our times. In a sense it has been always so, but if all human epochs are equal on some level, on another some are much more equal than others. The question posed by the inflated shadows looming over our days—so many outsized Gretas and Roxies, Bonnies Blue and Clydes Black-and-White, along with the extended tribe of motley pseudo-ethicists, pseudo-pundits, pseudo-spiritualists, and pseudo-liberated spirits that the internet age has spawned in such frightful profusion—is not how relatively mild (or particularly noxious) this or that individual specimen may look in the context of our current Shop of Horrors, but why in heaven’s name we should be paying any attention at all to the truckloads of trash that are getting dumped on us from every direction. If we allow it, that is, by making the cardinal mistake of drawing our phones from their holsters without the necessary precautions that safe use requires more than ever today.

     Could anyone doubt, upon taking a sober view of our contemporary cultural landscape, how daunting the struggle for mental hygiene must be when we have a pseudo-president popping up on every screen, pseudo-artists crowding every corner, and plenty of pseudo-philosophers, too, crowing from their respective perches while sunning themselves in the ancient luster that the mother of all intellectual disciplines still retains at least in part? No doubt there are a few credible statesmen still to be found here and there, as well as some genuine devotees of the Muses, and even an occasional true heir of Socrates: the life of the mind does not die in a day. The more hopeful cases are increasingly superannuated, however, as more literate times keep receding every day a little further from memory—like so many remaindered books on the last tables of the discount section in the basement, waiting to be pulped.

     Inconveniently for our chronically breathless age, mastery is not attained in a season, or in a few years; it is a project of decades, perhaps lifetimes, predicated on single-minded devotion, or else it is nothing. Nor can the leading lights of our species be neatly assembled for our convenient consumption on the latest feed. Instead, they are scattered about the centuries, often in obscure corners that require patience and determination to discover and dig out, like rare mushrooms that must be unearthed and carefully examined for poisons and parasites. Am I suggesting that we are but two-legged pigs, led by our noses? Maybe so, maybe not; but even if we were no more than glorified swine, it would still make all the difference to our condition whether we content ourselves with feeding at the trough, rooting through the garbage, and trampling under unclean hoofs every tender shoot of learning and refinement, or whether we keep searching, in the old manner of the best of our kind, for truffles in the mysterious, magical, sacred forests of the mind.

     This latter work of nosing out mysteries cannot be done very effectively on the flickering screen; it requires laborious effort at a snail’s or at least paper-pace, not electron-speed, and I fear that we have already lost not only much of the eye and the snout it requires, but the stomach and the stamina as well, to say nothing of the mental muscle. But not to worry, when the chat-bots and other AI-minions can soon take over the last of our thinking for us! The contemptible stickmen that I have been remonstrating with for years (#71, #83, #148, #187) bear ample witness to how far we already are into the reign of King Biceps and Sirs Bigfoot lording it ever-more haughtily over heads visibly shrunken and minds correspondingly atrophied and puny.

     As the likes of Socrates and Epictetus worked so hard to make us see, with modest success, a life of what human wisdom we are capable of requires minding our own business (#110, #150); becoming self-reflective in the right way; bringing our cravings and aversions under control along with our existential ignorance; and above all, learning to direct our attention with much more deliberation and circumspection than we commonly have to spare for it (#174)—that is to say, holding steadfastly to the upward path that leads, via Epictetus’s “good use of our impressions,” from the depths of our cavernous delusions to the vivifying illumination that only the Sun of the true, the good, and the beautiful can provide.

     In making our way towards that liberating light, everything depends (to simplify a little) on whether we are at last able to see through and let go the fatal illusion that the world needs to pay attention to me because I appear to be placed at its center. I doubt that any of us are truly free of this affliction: not for nothing does the Buddhist orthodoxy reserve this most remarkable state of being to those who have walked the Path all the way to its end, nothing short of full and final liberation (#43, Samyutta Nikaya 22:89). Until then the delusions around our sense of self, however attenuated by practice and insight, will continue to linger like the scent on fresh laundry (or rather, the odor, since it was urine and cow-dung that were used for solvents in the Buddha’s day, not scented industrial detergents). For my own part, I am only too aware of the dangers that lurk whenever we allow ourselves to be lured from quietly going about our business to eyeing with unease the dials and counters that suggest we may not be getting enough recognition in the world (#41, #65). Alas, to see a problem of this fundamental kind, however clearly, is only the first step in a journey of ten thousand miles or more…

     We are none of us in a very convincing position to judge what others ought to hear, especially when we are doing the talking ourselves. I hold that cautionary principle high and dear, but it cuts both ways: while it does not fall to the cook to pronounce upon the merits of the dinner he is preparing (as Hobbes once put it), neither is it his responsibility to withhold or disparage the fruits of his own labors, so long as they reflect the best he can offer, more or less. Whether to relish the alphabet soup or to push the stew away with distaste and indignation is for the reader to decide, not the writer to determine.

     Like an honest cook, a sincere author may well point out that you are under no obligation to dine with him, and that if you can find superior fare elsewhere, then you should enjoy your meals there, and may it be for the best! Only let us please keep in mind, wherever we may turn for our sustenance, that the provisions in question are not merely the repasts of a day, but the standards by which we live our lives. Go ahead, then, and look wherever you may hope to find your treasure at the end of the rainbow; but while doing so, be sure to keep up the good fight, aim high not low, and cast away the crooked yardsticks that our debased attention-economy keeps churning out and foisting upon us with such vulgar abandon. Let others garner what riches they can off the glittering junk, the kind that draws the moths and rusts in a season; pay them no heed and make yourself more truly rich, or honorable poor at least, by turning away without a second thought.*

*Or, as the Buddha is said to have once summarized the whole of his Teaching, when he was asked to give it the most concise expression possible: seek out what is wholesome, stay away from what is unwholesome, and keep purifying your mind… (Dhammapada 14.5) Who can say for sure how to translate this rudimentary roadmap into concrete rules for engaging with the hazards of the internet, gross and subtle. Steering clear entirely would not be very pragmatic, while getting too close, too incautiously, would be far too perilous. The key surely lies in cultivating one’s higher faculties, however one may wish to understand the term, and in not taking the menace of mental depravations lightly, as we so often do when we laugh off the wretched online-diet as so much harmless diversion. Diverting the mind from its better purposes and greater potential is not harmless at all.