Notes on attention

Attention is not passive. It's not just receiving. It's a form of action. Attention is all you need (in life too) explores this at the level of neural architecture.

When you attend to something, you're saying: this matters. This is worth my cognitive resources. This is why Why I write — writing is where I direct my deepest attention.

Over time, what you attend to becomes what you are. Your mind is shaped by its attention patterns. The shape of a thought shows how attention literally shapes the shape of ideas.

This is why social media is so dangerous. Not because it's full of bad information. It's dangerous because it hijacks attention. It makes you attend to things that don't serve you.

And you can't think yourself out of it. Thinking requires attention. If your attention is already gone, you're stuck. Writing is a search procedure requires reclaiming your attention.

The practice of sustained attention is meditation. The practice of chosen attention is reading. The practice of creative attention is writing.

All of these are practices of freedom — and freedom from what The stub problem calls the paralysis of incomplete ideas.