The Attention Economy Monetizes Our Fear of Boredom

Know Your Enemy: Pay Attention! (w/ Chris Hayes)

Matthew Sitman:

Simone Weil, great line that prayer is a form of attention. And I actually went back and looked at that this morning and it’s even more stark than I realized.

She writes, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”¹

And I thought about that a lot lately because I’ve been thinking about prayer and working on a little piece about prayer. And I was at mass just a couple months ago and it was an amazing kind of homily on distraction. And the priest, he talked about sin as a distraction, which I thought was interesting because what happens in the garden of Eden, the shiny red apple, if you want to call it a red apple, gets presented to even then Adam–They’re given a new object of attention and desire.

And in some ways, being a person who is sinful means you’re giving your attention to the wrong things, in the wrong quantities, in the wrong amounts.

And another aspect of what this priest said in the homily that I really loved too was something like praying the rosary, right, where you have a physical object in your hand, it gives you something to do with your hand, right, you’re kind of moving through the beads. He said that, like meditation, distracts us from distraction by repetition and patterns and therefore it frees us to give our attention to, you know, it’s proper object, especially in prayer, which is God, Christ.

And I just wanted to say I’ve alluded to this and I won’t go into full details, but I have had one very profound religious experience since I’ve become Catholic, on a Holy Thursday evening service. And as I was reading your book, Chris, I thought, you know, one of the best ways to describe what I experienced, and it was profound, I’ve never experienced anything like it, was that there was kind of no distractions there. God had my total attention and I had his, if I can put it that way.

And sometimes people come to me asking for advice, especially kind of existential advice since I’ve written about depression. And if they’re open to religion or interested in it, I say go to mass or an Anglican service, something with ritual…where you get put out of mind, you’re literally kind of getting out of your head in a good way.

You’re kind of removing those distractions that are constantly pecking at you, how many places in our culture and society, do you kind of sit quietly, and meditate for an hour or two hours, whatever it might be.

So I’m not using this to proselytize, but I’m just very interested in—even for listeners who aren’t religious, what the age of attention, the attention economy is doing to our souls. What kind of people is the attention economy creating?

Chris Hayes:

…I think like a religion is like an ancient technology for managing attention…And I think that Catholic Christian or Jewish prayer or Muslim prayer are all different forms of sustained attention on something seeking communion past yourself, a way of sort of ordering the structure of your inner life towards a productive purpose and towards an elevated purpose.

Matthew Sitman:

And I think importantly in the Christian sense, you’re directing your attention to the infinite. It’s not a finite substance. In that sense, it’s different than the logic of other things you can give your attention to.

Chris Hayes:

Yes, I also think the flip side of exactly what you’re describing…My most searing memories of mass as a kid was a level of boredom that felt overwhelming. And I just remember at least, I would memorize digits of pie, I would run through the top 10 NL ERA leaders [hosts laugh], I would just desperately create some internal mental gymnastics. And I think it’s because at that age, and maybe I’m just a spiritually stunted person. But I think at that age, it’s very hard to practice that discipline, spiritually, and so what you’re left with is just this level of boredom.

But one of the things I right in the book, and I think this gets to the point you’re making…boredom is actually essential, and turning away from it towards distraction, diversion, you know, to go back to the homily your citing, diversion is sort of adjacent to sin. And I think that there’s something about boredom and holiness that are inseparable from each other, that is a kind of unarticulated insight of the book, but also a pretty important thing to think about.

Sam Adler-Bell:

Well, boredom is a condition that we feel we need a solution to, that it is so painful to just be inside one’s own mind. Whether that’s because certain kinds of creeping thoughts come to us that are unbidden and unpleasant, or because we don’t know what to do with our limbs, because time just becomes like taffy and it’s unendurable.

And religious ritual and sort of collective participation in contemplation of some sort, tries to cultivate the virtues of boredom, but it also is a solution to boredom…The whole thing we’re talking about, this attention economy, is also a solution to boredom, or it’s a response to the universal experience of boredom that monetizes our fear of boredom into what we all agree as a sort of destructive and alienating end.

Chris Hayes:

And it’s a response that also exacerbates boredom. When Pascal is writing Pensées and he’s writing about boredom, he basically says, “The king has every diversion imaginable to him.” And because of that, if he’s without diversion for a second, he sort of feels bored and trapped. And that’s all of us now, you know? And I think there is a moral spiritual dimension to this. And I think there’s also an ethical dimension to it, which is this inability to sit with your own thoughts or be with yourself or be in communion with God or focused on the rosary, or however you’re going to practice that.

There is something we’re seeing in grand scale with Elon Musk right now who [has], in a deep theological sense, fallen pray to deep wickedness, born of his absolutely compulsive desire for attention and diversion.