Attention & Identity
How We Become What We Behold
“If you don’t know who you are, the world will tell you.” — Carl Jung1
Just this week, while camping in Steamboat Springs, I sauntered by a young man from New Hampshire reclining in a canvas chair along the banks of the Yampa River. On the far side, to the south, the low mountains rose in waves of green, with the wind dancing through the aspen leaves on their slopes in that musical way they do in Spring. At our feet, the river flow sang in concert with the hummingbirds seeking their nectar in the blue and yellow columbines, and the air was graced from time to time with fairies of fluff from the cottonwood trees lining the banks. His feet were resting on an old grey stump, and his head was down and focused.
I was doing laundry that day, hauling my loads back and forth to the facilities in the camp, so I ended up walking past his perch by the river several times over the course of three hours.
I never once saw him look up.
I hoped at first it might be a book that had so fully captured his attention—an idyllic notion that cheered my heart. But then I saw it was a phone he held, and spied the telltale flip of his thumb as he flicked through the reels.
By now, we all know how the algorithm works. It tracks your delays as you scroll through endless queues of short-form videos, each designed to tap your brain’s endorphin response. Whatever you linger on, even for an extra half-second, it feeds you more videos just like that. The goal, as we know, is to keep you riveted, not for your edification or even your entertainment, but in service of the ads that appear on the screens periodically as you scroll.
This is our attention economy2, refined and purified into a digital drug, a continuous stream of stimulant addiction every bit as potent as a line of powder you snort through your nose.
I see it everywhere all the time, now, of course, just like we all do. People walking in the park, oblivious to the park. People working out in the gym, eyes fixed on their phones between every absentminded set. People eating on their lunch breaks, never really tasting, or even seeing, their food. But I was struck by the heightened contrast of that particular river scene: the strangeness of this young man going to all the trouble of packing up his gear and driving across the country, of setting up a tent in such a stunningly beautiful place, and sitting himself down right in the middle of it, only to have his attention hijacked for hours by that tiny little screen.
We humans are relational by nature, and every act of attention is an invitation to an exchange.3 No doubt you have noticed how different aspects of your personality suddenly emerge as if from nowhere around certain friends or loved ones, only to go dormant again when they are not around. Everyone pulls something slightly different out of us; sometimes this reveals something new and unexpected about us that we did not know was there. Transcendence often arises from the dance of longtime partners, unveiling a secret grace within each they could not find alone. The most beautiful truths of who we are, and of who we may potentially become, are either called forth or diminished by the people with whom we interact. Though we may not often speak of it, most of us are keenly aware of this effect, and so it makes perfect sense to us to guard who has access to our presence, to be careful to whom we give our attention.
But it is not only our attention to people that shapes us, but also the attention we give—or fail to give—to the physical world around us: the trees as they wave in the wind in the park, the staccato rhythms of a city at night, the complex mix of scents in the subway, the music of the river, and the light of the sun dancing on its surface as it flows past our feet.
All of these things carry the power to shape our sense of ourselves and our place in the world—both in the moment of connection, and, when such moments are integrated as practice, over the course of a lifetime.
Everything in the universe is continually in flux. Reality drifts. Everything changes—is continuously changing—including us. We are not static creatures. We are emergent. Like everything else in creation, we are still becoming. The old saying goes: “No man steps into the same river twice.” Yet it is also true to say: No river meets the same man twice. Our souls unfold as rivers do, but in ways that are far more nuanced and beautiful than they; and the world and its people are the riverbanks and stones that over time shape the boundaries of who we become, setting our course and the patterns of our flow.
Watching that young man lost in his phone by the Yampa that day brought to mind this passage from The Duino Elegies, which I recently studied in one of Adam Walker’s insightful classes on Versed:
“Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it?”— Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The First Duino Elegy”
Something in that river scene was calling to the young man, just as it was to me. Something ineffable and powerful and seductively shy wanted his attention. But the moment was stolen.
We’re all being invited in just the same way, by everything around us all the time: the dappled light in the leaves of the trees, the dance of the wind in the late afternoon, the color of flowers, the first star of evening, the twitch of a curious squirrel’s tail—all of it is invitation. There is something in the heart of creation that longs for our attention. It invites our conscious presence. Perhaps somehow it needs us to continue its creative work. Or, perhaps it knows we need it to complete our own.
I love the way David Whyte speaks to this in his poem “Everything Is Waiting For You”:
“Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.”— David Whyte, from “Everything Is Waiting For You”
It is with our attention that we connect and create, that we explore and question, and come to understand, at least in part, the great mysteries of the universe. It is through the gift of attention that we honor those we love and, indeed, through the artful practice of attention that we make love with life itself. When we seek out what is beautiful, and good, and true in the world around us and offer it the gift of our attentive presence, we catalyze a generative alchemy that not only reveals something new in what we behold, but also births something new in us.
Attention is the key that unlocks the door of our becoming. We are ineluctably shaped—for the better or for the worse—by whatever we allow to hold our gaze.
Attention As Prey
In my late 20s, I worked as the managing editor of a publishing house in Colorado. We produced books for leaders working in faith-based contexts all around the world. I enjoyed the creativity of that work, and I’m grateful for the experiences that shaped me through those years. The marketers in our advertising department were often fond of saying that our marketing efforts were providing a service to the public, that our targeted, high-dollar ad campaigns were, in the end, simply our best attempts to let people know about the resources we had that could better their lives.
That may have been true back then. But that’s not the way it is anymore. Advertising these days feels far less like a public service and far more like a bloodthirsty hunt. It’s invasive, ubiquitous…even pestilent. The well known writer and social prophet Paul Kingsnorth calls it “The Machine.”4 Listen to how he describes it in his book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity:
“I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net. I think: These are things designed to trap prey.”
At times its invasive persistence can be overbearing to the point of driving us mad. If the advertising industry were a person, we could have it arrested for harassment and no one would question the charge.
But worst of all is the quarry it now hunts. For the biggest corporations today are no longer just trying to get us to buy their products. They’re trying to get us.
Now, we are the product.
Sure, the corporations want our money, but our attention is the real rainmaker now, because once the Machine has fully captivated our attention, it can not only sell to us over and over and over again, it can also sell our attention itself, and make from it a far greater profit.
So it is that nowadays we are supposed to consider it part of “normal life” to have our attention actively hunted and tracked, fiercely and relentlessly, every single day. But, this is not really normal at all—certainly, it is not “healthy,” or even entirely “sane.” Have you ever attempted to count, for example, how many times in a single day the Machine tries to snatch your gaze? Every buzz or beep or chime on your phone, enticing you to pick it up? Every promo on your podcasts, every ad on your videos, every commercial peppered through the drama of your favorite shows? Every preview ad in the theater or product placement in the films you see? Every billboard on the highway as you commute to work or run your errands or pick up the kids from school? Every banner or box or popup ad on the websites you visit? Every unwanted sales call? Every propaganda piece on your newsfeed demanding yet another pound of your fear, outrage, and disgust? Every fresh dump of promotional emails in your inbox, or now, God help us, in your text feed too?
And then there are the multiple platforms made for endless scrolling: the apex predator of the attention jungle.
Is it any wonder, really, that we struggle so much to be present to our lives?
The big corporations want us to believe that our attention economy is purely transactional: We give them our attention, and they give us a thrill. No one is harmed. And if they make money off the exchange, so what? We might even enjoy the products they sell.
But the attention economy is not just transactional. It’s transformative.
In her provocative essay, “Attention & Will,” Simone Weil calls out a profound truth about the deeper nature of attention:
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolute unmixed attention is prayer.”
Bringing our full attention to anything—be it a person, a wilderness landscape, or a doomscrolling feed—is, by its very essence, an expression of affection and belief. To attend to something with your whole presence is a kind of prayer. It is an expression of love for the thing you behold. It is, as the poet Mary Oliver pointed out, an act of devotion.
“The beginning of devotion is paying attention.” — Mary Oliver
Attention is the avatar of our presence in the world. It is the sole conduit of our love and our devotion. It is, in the end, the only real gift we have to offer. As such, it is sacred. Where we give our attention is where we give our life.
But the gift flows both ways: Where we offer our attention, we also open our soul to the shaping influence of whatever has captured its gaze.
“You become what you give your attention to.” — Epictetus
Each time we surrender our attention to predatory powers that by no means have our best interests at heart, we subject our souls to the degrading influence of their dopamine-hit machinations. We lose connection with people and practices that inspire wonder, awe, beauty, love, and meaning, and instead find ourselves increasingly captivated by a banal parade of spectacle, thrill, shock, lust, and distraction. Weeks or even months can go by in this malnourished state, until one morning we wake to notice a sinking feeling of emptiness deep in our chest that we cannot explain. We feel as if something essential has been hollowed out of us and stolen away. But we’ve no idea where it has gone or how we’ll ever get it back again.
“When we live superficially...we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions...we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives.” — Thomas Merton, from Thoughts in Solitude
When we squander our attention on worthless distraction, we starve the essential connection to the soul of our humanity. We lose touch with the nobility of our highest nature, and forget the true ideals of what we can be. Our human capacities—to choose, to create, to think critically or even to imagine—all weaken and atrophy as we habitually outsource these functions to external powers.5 We not only lose connection with the truth of who we are; we lose sight of the highest potential of who we may yet become.
The Counter Voice: The True Self
That is not to say that our identity is fully at the mercy of whatever banal pursuits capture our attention. For there is also within us a Divine seed, a compass heading, a magnetic attraction to our one True North that is always pulling us in the direction of the essence and form of who and what we are meant to be. This sacred impulse goes by many names—the Still Small Voice, the Deepest Heart’s Desire, the Wild Self, the Path of Aliveness, the Source, the Inner Knowing, the True Self, the Voice of God, and others—but its nature and approach are the same in us all. It is quiet, yet persistent, more whisper than roar, and its pull feels simultaneously foundational to our existence and dangerously easy to dismiss. It invites rather than demands, preferring gentle enticements over brow-beating accusations. It does not judge. It does not motivate by shame. It calls forth. It loves. It reveals the path one’s true heart must take, and cares nothing for litanies of “shoulds” and “oughts,” however well-reasoned they may at first glance appear.
From Gerald May, in The Awakened Heart:
“There is a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart. We were born with it, it is never completely satisfied, and it never dies. We are often unaware of it, but it is always awake . . . Our true identity, our reason for being, is to be found in this desire.”
And Thomas Kelly, from A Testament of Devotion:
“Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astonishing destiny, calling us home unto itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life.”
And Malcolm Guite, author of Merlin’s Isle: An Arthuriad:
“You don’t have to invent yourself because somebody else who loves you has already done it. You from the beginning, the real heart of who you are, deeper and more beautiful than you could ever know, has simmered in the Divine mind since before the beginning of time. And now he’s speaking to you.”
This sampling of insights are from teachers in my own Christian tradition. But wise souls in nearly all the great faiths, and more than a few philosophies, speak of this Voice in one form or another, and stress our vital need to hear it and follow its lead.
In our tech-driven culture, the default assumption is that faster is better than slower. But the human soul is not designed to live at a continuous breakneck pace. To go slowly is often the better choice for our thriving. To be fully present to the natural world around us as we pass through each moment is even better yet. To make a regular practice of solitude and deep listening to the Voice of Spirit within us is the best of all.
From Richard Rohr, author of Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self:
“In solitude we learn slowly to live face-to-face with a Presence that asks nothing of us but presence in return. When we become present to Presence, we experience the genuine birth of the soul. If we’ve never lived in the realm of pure Presence, at first we don’t know how to breathe there. But eventually we allow ourselves to be defined by relationship itself instead of by the good or bad—or even the holy—things we’ve done. And it is relationship with everything: the rocks at our feet, the air that we breathe consciously, the little animals and birds, the God who is now obvious and praiseworthy in all things. Solitude can connect us to everything else.”
I have seen the power of this principle play out hundreds of times in my work as a coach over the years. I’ve been privileged to partner with successful leaders both in the church and the corporate world, as well as high-level influencers and artists in both Hollywood and Nashville. Though every circumstance has been different, and every challenge unique, the key to discerning the ideal path forward for my clients has always depended on shutting out the rapid-fire distraction of their attention-hungry environments and genuinely slowing down enough to really listen to the Voice of their true heart’s desire deep inside. Though this is not always easy to accomplish, the approach has never failed to point my clients in the best possible direction they could go—the one direction that aligns with who they really are at the core and the true gift they are meant to bring to the world.
Becoming all we’re meant to be is ultimately an inside-out job. The quality of attention we give to the Divine Center within us is the single most critical factor in that good work, for it is through listening to that Inner Voice that we develop the self awareness and clarity of purpose necessary to resist the predatory influences of the Machine as it constantly seeks to captivate and remake us in its image. Becoming a mature, fully-realized human being has always been a good idea. But now, on account of the Machine, I would argue it is a matter of our survival as a species. As Howard Thurman so wisely said many years ago:
“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.”
Paying Attention as a Revolutionary Act
So what we have here is a war. Our attention is the battlefield. And the quality of human we each either fall or rise to become is the destiny that hangs in the balance.
“I believe that attention, the kind of attention we choose to pay, and indeed whether we attend at all, wholly alters what we discover in the world we come to know—which is of course all that any of us can know. Attention is, then, a creative (or destructive) act and therefore necessarily a moral act.”—Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and the Emissary
Paying attention is not a neutral act. Attention shapes destiny—both for us as individuals and for our society at large. Whether we wish to admit it or not, we are shaped by the things to which we devote our attention. Without conscious vigilance, our attention can be hijacked and manipulated so that we forget ourselves and our ideals, and devolve into hollow puppets leveraged for other people’s gain.
Our collective attention is now being hunted by an industrious Machine that is not the least bit interested in our individual development as people, or our shared potential as a human species. In fact, its needs would be much better served if we all remained shallow and gullible, and ignorant of its aims. It has dehumanized us as a people by reducing the sacredness of human presence to nothing more than a product to be leveraged for profit. Its relentless assault threatens to sever our vital link not only to the richness of our own humanity, but also to the millions of humans who have lived before us—to their stories, their wisdom, their courage, their brilliance, the critical lessons of their failures—and our shared story as one people unfolding through time.
Human attention is a sacred thing. Discerning what is worthy of our attention—what should or should not get it—is a sacred duty, and a critical one.
The restoration of our essential humanity begins with the reclaiming of our conscious agency around where we put our attention. Where you choose to focus your gaze each and every day is the front line of the battle for the future of humanity. As Boyd Varty, author of A Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, rightly says:
“Creating a new future is about becoming aware of where we place our attention and how this directs where our life goes.”
For these truths are inescapable:
We will inevitably go in the direction we’re looking. We will inevitably become like whatever we behold.
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