My Attention, Please

I want to write impactful images that flood the brain with oxytocin like scrolling cat photos on instagram. 

I struggled to focus on much of anything this week, either in writing or work. I sat next to Ben on the couch a lot, my brain overtaken by cartoon animals yelling and falling from comically high buildings and not dying, or alien hedgehogs running fast between live actors. I might be able to recite Sonic 2 is what I’m trying to say. 

We went back into hospital mode because Ben was sick (normal sick but sick nonetheless), but back then, when he was Big Sick, I was doing little projects for work that hardly required synapses to fire, just a finger to push buttons. Now, I have to read a little. Still not a lot. A well trained animal could probably still do what I do, but it would be shushing everyone so it could concentrate. 

Writing when those movies are on is out of the question. It’s not that I need to be in flow state or anything so highfalutin as that, but I need to be able to hear myself think, and I absolutely cannot tune out witty banter. Or things moving on a screen. I’m still a child in a lot of ways. If a TV is on in my vicinity, it has my attention. I zone out. Occasionally I can do the same thing, the hyperfixate thing, with books, but with TV, it’s automatic, which makes me sad. 

It’s gotten better. I used to not be able to have a conversation if I was near a TV. My sister could tell if I was sitting in the family room when she would call home from college because she did not have my attention, as much as I tried to fake it. 

Isn’t it funny that in childhood memories, it’s either Christmas or warm out? I think my mind weeded out bored days in February or gray November afternoons from my past. When I think back on childhood, everything is green and gold, and it’s morning. The sun is warm and dust motes float on lazy airstreams. For some reason, I’m in the family room in this sunny golden memory. Is the TV on? Who knows. This is a snapshot, all still except those motes, one by one, moving so slowly you have to watch them close, to make sure. 

The boys have the tv on now, so I’m fighting for my own attention again. These things are specifically geared to keep the attention of kids, who obviously have the shortest attention spans on the planet. So they have mine too, despite my intentions of being a grown-up and being an inspired writer or serious professional. So next to the tv in the other room - not even the same room! I’m hopeless! - and the notifications that keep popping up on, I kid you not, my phone, watch AND laptop upon which I’m typing, I have no fight left. I understand why people do their writing first thing in the morning, but my boys are in that terrible phase, you know the one. The earlier I wake up, the earlier they wake up. So soon, we’re all up at 5am, and no one is writing. 

I stopped logging on to Instagram and Facebook a few months ago. I couldn’t bring myself to deactivate the accounts, but I haven’t logged in. At first it was hard, and then I didn’t think about it at all. Sometimes, I wish I could scroll through hilarious cat photos, but mostly, I’m able to be more intentional about keeping in touch with people who are important to me. I don’t know what a lot of people are up to anymore, but I miss that less than I expected. You know how they say that when you can’t tell what’s being sold, you’re the product? I get that now that I’m off those apps. The main thing Instagram was doing to me was convincing me to buy things, either directly through ads or via paid posts from influencer types or celebs or whatever. I didn’t think my attention was valuable, but we’ve probably saved several hundred dollars in the past 3 months of me not getting targeted Instagram ads. I don’t miss the products at all. You know what I bought more of this week? Refill ink for my cool pen, which was a gift from my husband (who may have found Baronfig via targeted Instagram ad, but that’s neither here nor there). But I’ve been writing more in my little journal instead of scrolling and scrolling. 

To be honest, Substack has been fulfilling the scrolling urge and stealing more of my attention than I’d like. The Notes function is a bit of a time suck, but it’s where all the connection is on the app. I have met people I genuinely like via Notes. I saw (and was part of) some back and forth about Notes, mainly because a guy declared that people who use Notes like social media are doing it wrong, and it should only be about the writing. He had a point. If we give our attention to cat photos and not up-and-coming writers, Substack becomes a little further from its initial starting point. But I enjoy the cat photo part. And please don’t ever tell me what to do, man on the internet.

Our attention, our focus, our minds really, have been commodified. How often do we stay behind screens and barely interact with the world? That’s most of my everyday. I work at a computer in my basement, and when I log off of that, I can’t wait to get behind this other, happier looking screen in my living room or bedroom to write down all of my precious thoughts, that I then hope to release into the wild and share with people I’ve met or want to connect with on the internet. And there are a lot of people living this way. As much as I hate it, I am living the cautionary tale I warn my kids about. My brain is mush, my attention is flighty, my phone rules my life. It’s gross. 

Ever the optimizer, my next thought is to wonder what should have top claim on my attention. What makes me the best version of human? The easy answer is my kids, to make me the best mom I can be. But then, shouldn’t I be teaching them that they can’t have all of my attention all the time? That they can entertain themselves and find things to do on their own? So maybe writing is the thing, right? I mean, that would be great if I could focus on that without a thousand interruptions, and now it’s gotten to the point where I have to leave the house to focus on it for any actual length of time. Work, I guess, should be high on my list of attention-getters, but that gets enough attention to get paid and not a bit more. 

There’s no moral here. I want to give my attention only to deserving people and pursuits, but there are too many pulls on it. I wish I had the right answer. I would share it if I did. Knowing how valuable all of our attention is, maybe a start would be to start taking that responsibility, the responsibility of where we place our attention, a little more seriously, with a little more respect. Start seeing cats doing stupid things in real life rather than seeking out videos of them online.