Attention is not a resource
How the “attention economy” framing takes us away from our most human qualities and experience
Welcome to The Perpetual Beginner. This piece was first published by Aeon a few years ago. After being quoted in the FT on this topic last week, I thought I’d repost here, with just a few edits relative to the original version.1 Please do share comments and reflections below.
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom” – so said the biologist E. O. Wilson at the turn of the century. Fast-forward to the smartphone era and it seems as though our mental lives are more fragmented and scattered than ever. In this context, the “attention economy” is a phrase often used to make sense of what’s going on: it puts our attention at the centre of the informational ecosystem, with all of our various apps and alerts and notifications locked in a constant battle to capture it.
It’s a helpful narrative in a world of information overload, and one in which our devices and apps are intentionally designed to get us hooked. And besides offering insight into our individual mental wellbeing, the attention economy frame offers a way of looking at some important social and political problems, from declines in measures of empathy through to the weaponisation of social media.
The problem, though, is that this narrative assumes a certain kind of attention. An economy, after all, deals with the efficient allocation of resources in the service of specific objectives (such as maximising profits). Accordingly, talk of the attention economy relies on the notion of attention-as-a-resource: your attention is to be applied in the service of some goal – and if you don’t put it in the service of your own objectives, then you can be sure that your attention will be seized upon and exploited by the digital platforms constantly fighting to capture it.
However, conceiving of attention as a resource misses the fact that attention is not just useful. It is more fundamental than that: attention is what joins us to the world. Paying attention in an instrumental way is important, sure, but we also have the capacity to attend in a more exploratory way: to be truly open to whatever we find before us, without any particular agenda.
During a recent trip to Japan, for example, I found myself with a few unplanned hours to spend in Tokyo. Stepping out into the busy district of Shibuya, I wandered aimlessly amid the neon signs and crowds of people. My senses met the wall of smoke and the cacophony of sound as I passed through a busy pachinko parlour. For the entire time, my attention was in “exploratory” mode. That experience stood in marked contrast to later that evening when I had to focus on navigating the metro system, for instance.
The two sides of attention
Treating attention as a resource, then, as tacitly assumed by the attention economy framing, tells us only half of the overall story. And specifically, it tells the left half of the story.
For according to the philosopher and psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, the brain’s left and right hemispheres deliver the world to us in two fundamentally different ways – and an instrumental mode of attention, McGilchrist contends, is the mainstay of the brain’s left hemisphere, which tends to divide up whatever it’s presented with into component parts: it always looks to categorise and analyse things so that it can utilise them towards some goal.
By contrast, the brain’s right hemisphere naturally adopts an exploratory mode of attending: a more embodied awareness, one that is open to whatever makes itself present before us, in all its fullness. This mode of attending typically comes into play when we pay attention to other people, to the natural world and to works of art. None of these fare too well if we attend to them as a means to an end. And it is this mode of paying attention, McGilchrist argues, that offers us the broadest possible experience of the world.
So, as well as attention-as-resource, it’s important that we retain a clear sense of what I call attention-as-experience. I believe that this is what William James had in mind when he wrote in 1890 that “what we attend to is reality”: the simple but profound idea that what we pay attention to, and how we pay attention, shapes our reality, moment to moment, day to day, and so on.
What’s more, it is this more exploratory mode of attention that connects us to our deepest sense of purpose. For instance, it’s notable how many non-instrumental and exploratory forms of attention practice lie at the heart of various spiritual traditions. In Awareness Bound and Unbound (2009), the Zen teacher David Loy characterises an unenlightened existence (samsara) as simply the state in which one’s attention becomes “trapped” as it grasps from one thing to another, always looking for the next thing to latch on to. Nirvana, for Loy, is simply a free and open attention that is completely liberated from such fixations. Or take Simone Weil, the French Christian mystic. She saw prayer as attention “in its pure form”; she wrote that the “authentic and pure” values in the activity of a human being, such as truth, beauty and goodness, all result from a particular application of full attention.
How to restore balance
The problem, then, is twofold.
First, there’s the fact that the constant deluge of stimuli competing to grab our attention leads us to consume the world in bits and pieces – crowding out space for the exploratory mode of attention. When I get to the bus stop now, I automatically reach for my phone, rather than stare into space; my fellow commuters, when I do raise my head, seem to be doing the same thing.
But on top of this, the second problem is that the narrative of the attention economy, for all its merits, reinforces a conception of attention-as-a-resource, rather than attention-as-experience.
At the limit case, we might imagine a world in which we gradually lose touch with attention-as-experience altogether. Attention becomes solely a thing to utilise, a means of getting things done, something from which value can be extracted; I’m reminded of an essay by the cultural critic Jonathan Beller – aptly titled Paying Attention – that conjures a disembodied, inhuman dystopia in which, Beller writes, “humanity has become its own ghost”.
While such an outcome may sound extreme, there are hints that modern psyches are moving in this direction. One famous study, for instance, found that most men chose to receive an electric shock rather than be left to their own devices (that is, be left with no entertainment on which to fix their attention). Or take the quantified self movement, in which “life loggers” use smart devices to track thousands of daily movements and behaviours in a quest to amass self-knowledge. It’s important to note that if you adopt such a mindset, data is the only valid input. Your direct, felt experience of the world simply does not compute.
Thankfully, no society has reached this dystopia – yet. But faced with a stream of claims on our attention, and narratives that invite us to treat it as a resource to mine, we need to work to keep our instrumental and exploratory modes of attention in balance. How might we do this?
To begin with, when we talk about attention, we need to defend framing it in experiential terms, and not merely as a “cognitive resource” or as a means to some other end.
Next, we can reflect on how we spend our time. Besides following expert advice on digital habits (turning off notifications, keeping our phones out of the bedroom, and so on), we can be proactive in making a good amount of time each week for activities that nourish us in an open, receptive, undirected way: taking a stroll, visiting a gallery, listening to a record.
Perhaps most of all, though, we can simply return to an embodied, exploratory mode of attention, just for a moment or two, as often as we can throughout the day. Watching your breath, say, with no agenda. In an age of fast-paced technologies and instant gratification, that might sound a little… underwhelming. But there can be beauty and wonder in the unadorned act of experiencing. Perhaps this is what Weil had in mind when she wrote that the correct application of attention can lead us to “the gateway to eternity… the infinite in an instant.”
The Aeon version of this article was published in 2018. The piece in the Financial Times quoting me on the attention economy, “The human mind is in a recession”, was published on 16 February 2025. Written by Tej Parikh, it looks at how technology is straining our brain health, capacity and skills.