Attention is All That We Have
I was once chatting with a friend about the consequential life decisions: what to study, where to work, which city to move to, who to date, whether to get married, what kind of family we want… with affordance to decide what to do with our lives, we felt the vertigo of choices. My friend told me that, although she had many options available to her, she was afraid to commit to any particular track. To me, her fear was about more than just the disappearance of options that comes with making a decision, since the choice of picking a career track was reversible: career pivots were nothing new among our friends. But there’s something more permanent about what we choose, because what we commit our attention to will shape us.
There was a moment, several years into my career as a software developer, I found myself using an analogy to CPUs to explain my system of housework chores: I was making the argument that having reusable items (like kitchen towels) was preferable to having disposable ones (like paper towels) because when I needed some clean towel, the cost of washing a reusable item at home was akin to L1/L2 cache, an operation I could complete locally; the cost of restocking a stash of disposable ones required me to interact with a store which may or may not have what I need, an operation more expensive like a memory access. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I had a moment of incredulity: my thinking was so deeply shaped by computers that THIS was the analogy that came to my mind.
David Foster Wallace, in what might be the most renowned graduation speech, implored the young graduates to make a conscious choice of what they give their attention to:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
DFW meant many things by “worship”, but the simplest reading still holds: replace “worship” with “pay attention to.” People say that power corrupts and that fear makes self-fulfilling prophecies: what we pay attention to shapes us, and in turn influences what else we pay attention to. It’s a dynamic loop that we have some conscious control over, and each decision is consequential, indeed.
But perhaps the challenging thing, is that it’s not great to be in a state of indecision, either. In moments of boredom, or when the thing that I wish I could pay attention to is also causing me distress, my attention is most vulnerable to being hijacked. There are entire industries whose profit incentives are capturing and holding people’s attention. Open an internet marketing website, you’d see a slew of acronyms: ASL (average session length), TTFP (time to first purchase), LTV (customer lifetime value), CPA (cost per acquisition). In the world of internet advertising, people’s attention is a commodity, being bought and sold to the highest bidder. Naturally, a whole matrix of dark UI patterns has been invented by people to optimize the KPIs of the attention economy to the detriment of everything else.1
On a daily basis, I find myself losing battles against the machine that tries to grab my attention. In the hazy exhaustion late at night, I often find myself reaching for my phone, checking some news feed or god forbid, browsing Twitter even though I don’t have an account, because what I crave is perhaps walking over to my friend and neighbour’s house to catch up, but my friends are far away, so social media becomes the easiest option. Then I’d suddenly wake up from a stupor, vaguely distressed from the internet acrimony that I’d just ingested, a mixture of real outrage and performative edginess, and it’s 2am and I should’ve gone to bed a long time ago.
There are other moments when I marvel at how the things that I’d paid attention to rewarded me. I’d be walking in a garden, and stumble upon a blooming tree. When I focus my eyes on the flowers, their intricate petals look translucent in sunlight. Suddenly I’d feel that the universe is smiling at me.
What is freedom in the information age? Swimming in the sea of advertising and social media and infotainment, perhaps it’s doing what we can to guard our internal garden, getting our say about what our attention goes to, for attention is precious and scarce. A great writer and programmer, Robert Nystrom, chose to take up knitting2:
The first real thing I knitted was a scarf for my mother-in-law. In retrospect, I can’t say it’s a great scarf. Kinda cheap acrylic yarn. Not really her color. 4x4 rib was about all I could handle complexity-wise at the time, and it means the scarf tends to bunch up on itself. But when she opened the package on Christmas and saw it, her eyes teared up. Mine are tearing up now writing this.
Because regardless of how good the object itself is, it is an inarguable testament to the fact that I chose to spend dozens of quiet hours making stitch after stitch, all the while thinking about her and how much she means to me. A fraction of my life’s wick that I burned for her and no one else.
In a world where so many seem to want to get more and more out of less and less, to automate and AI-ify everything until an infinite content firehose is blasting into every orifice of every consumer, hand knitting to me is the antidote. An acknowledgement that all we really have is time and thus there is no gift more precious than spending it on someone.
To what extent do we have a choice over how we end up being shaped, by what we commit our attention to? Before I chose to work in software, I did not foresee how much I ended up seeing the world through the lens of computers. Before I chose to move to New York, where I met my friend, I did not foresee how much I’d see people do things in New York I didn’t previously think of as possible, how many great friends I’d make, and how much they’d encourage me to try to do things I didn’t previously know to be possible. New York was a childhood dream of mine, but I didn’t know that moving to New York would make dream even bigger.
To whatever extent we have control over our choices, my friend and I will ultimately make them: about careers, cities, relationships. We’ll eventually decide what we pour our attention and care into. But in that conversation we had about these choices, where we sat with each other’s trepidations about such consequential choices, just being two young adults trying to find our paths in life, was a moment I deeply cherish. Not because we figured out the answers — there are no easy answers — but because in our moments of being unsure and uncertain about the world, we shared our attention with each other, and felt less alone. It was a precious gift, for attention is all that we have.
CJ the X has a searing manifesto about how Twitter corrodes thinking: https://cjthex.com/those-arent-tweets/
https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/30/consider-knitting/