The cost of our attention

My attention has been splintered and frayed, like the smashed up bristles of a very old paintbrush that does not want to pick up paint anymore.  I am vulnerable to diversion, literally leaving tasks mid-sentence – the other day, I left a water glass under our automatic water dispenser and returned to discover a mini waterfall cascading down my kitchen counter.  At lunch with my two female cousins last week, both of whom are in their mid-50s, we talked about menopause and one cousin said she noticed that she could no longer multitask the same way she used to.  I wonder if that is what I am experiencing?  I never considered myself a multitasker, until motherhood trained me to be one – not only could I keep the many tabs of my mind open, I learned to attend to each of them fully, because I had to.  But in the last few months, I’ve noticed that reminders invade my thoughts like unwanted pop-up ads and while I was once able to x out of these windows, my attention now obediently slackens toward the new thought and whatever I was working on is the proverbial abandoned glass, overflowing with precious water.

Perimenopause is part of it, I’m certain of it.  But I notice this splintering in my teenage students, too.  They can only absorb what I am saying to them for, at most, five minutes, before I see them begin to drift.  I’m getting very good at recognizing the particular glaze that dilates their eyes and though their body language performs a polite attention in my general direction, it’s as if I can see the actual mass of their attention peel out of their bodies like ghosts, and effervesce into the atmosphere, into the 0s and 1s of the ether.  

Attention is a commodity.  When I dabbled in marketing, the goal was to get “sticky eyeballs” on our website.  Every meeting was about how to create content that grabbed a user’s attention, knowing that attention has become ever more slippery and elusive because of the plethora of attractions and distractions available around the clock.  By now, we all know that when a digital service appears to be free – such as YouTube – it is you, or more precisely, your attention (the rich by-product of which is your data) that is the product being sold.  You can watch YouTube for “free” because it is watching you back and collecting information about your behavior so that it can then feed you the ads you [think] you want.

So it should come as no surprise that in English, we pay attention, as if it were a currency, or a tithe we had to give up to play the game, to hold our place within the system.  I’m no economist, but a quick search about the origin of the usage, “pay attention,” shows that it gained popularity in England in the 1750s, right around the time when England was transitioning to Industrial Capitalism.  And around the same time, English as a language began to gain dominance as a global language. 

Consider this –

In French, you do attention.

In Spanish, you lend attention.

In Russian, you convert attention.

In Polish, you watch out for attention.

In Arabic, you notice.

In Mandarin, attention (注意) is something you pour or gather.  Notice the three dots that is the radical for water in the character 注.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself about the glass of water I’d neglected.  I just need to gather the water and funnel it in a different way.