The Burden of Attention
Every form of conscious life bears the burden of attention, then each unit of conscious experience (i.e. the time between waking and returning to sleep) must be filled with something. It may be acknowledged that what that something is is the sum of where attention is directed, which, in turn, is directed by the framework of the games being played by the attention’s host.1games being here defined as the structure of one’s engagement, whatever that engagement may be
This is illuminating when one considers that circumstance is often thought of as the main driver of positive or negative experience. Really, it is the nature of our attention to circumstance that is decisive. Circumstance is only indirectly relevant — the degree to which either a “good” or a “bad” situation is determinant of quality of experience is tied directly to the extent of its expected demand on the attention of that which is experiencing.
One may consider the case of a deer, which splits its attention mostly between feeding, sleeping, mating and being wary of danger. Since the deer’s experience in any given moment will be the sum of the various things it is paying attention to, the character of its experience will depend on the extent to which it must pay attention to them. A charging predator, for example, requires 100% focus. This means that in the moments in which a deer must flee to avoid becoming a meal, the entirety of its attention — and, subsequently, its experience — will be consumed by the demands of the escape. When attention is understood not simply as a feature of the deer’s experience, but rather the essence of it, we see that these moments of fear are the experience itself, and, if we may assume that this is for a deer negative, we can understand that it is perfectly so. Even if it were running on an especially nutritious field of grass, so long as the danger moments persist, the grass (as positive experience) does not exist (from the deer’s perspective).
It follows that when (and only when) attention is engaged wholly with bad, experience is perfect suffering. Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you’re a deer), we can conclude that it is only bad circumstance which requires uncompromising focus that necessarily results in suffering.
Conversely, an engagement of attention wholly with good must then be synonymous with perfect bliss. From this it’s clear that the extent to which we enjoy things is the extent to which they positively capture our attention… and that the particular ways they positively capture our attention is precisely (and entirely) that which we enjoy about them. This is how it is possible that two people sitting next to each other in the same movie theatre can draw independent conclusions of a film’s value. Each has the same net sensory input, but their attention can filter the raw data so much so as to create essentially different experiences. 2 A fact that, importantly, provides insight as to how to better enjoy situations that we can’t change. Skill in directing attention enables positive experience in times where our default objects of focus would otherwise yield negative.
Attention can thus be understood as the foundation of conscious experience, and objects of attention the substance of it.
For our particular brand of consciousness, however, there is also another fundamental variable: purpose. We are unique in our ability to ask, “what’s the point?” … und thus also unique in our ability to lead ourselves to listlessness and nihilism.
If, as we have stated, the quality of conscious experience is a direct result of the engagement of attention, it is easier to see why we we have such a peculiar propensity for self-defeatism; the more ambiguous the answer to this most basic question seems to be, the more our attention gets tangled up in it. This is true even if we have external infrastructure that offers potential for quality engagement — without the freedom to move on from questions of why and into games of how, we cannot dedicate our attention to things that engage it positively. Teleological ambiguity is thus a formidable barrier to enjoying our moment to moment experience. 3 This helps explain why so many advise that the key to enjoying anything is to find ways to make it meaningful. The value of Cal Newport’s suggestion of the craftsman approach for discovering meaning in our work, for example, should become clear in this context
The trapping of attention in questions of purpose is not just significant in that it prevents our attention from resting in things that are good, but also in that the trap itself can become crushingly bad. This is, unfortunately, a familiar experience — an acute deficit of (perceived) meaning is suffered increasingly in our societies under many monikers, the most visible of which is depression.
Despite this, we may be comforted to consider that the cognitive tools that allow us to question meaning are both a blessing and a curse. If we can succeed in defining a purpose, our ceiling for positive experience is far higher than any other conscious being, then this same capacity also enables us to shape the circumstances that engage our attention.
For such a species, the burden of attention has latent potential to become a wonderful luxury.
A Journey to Autonomy
Most humans in the modern world enjoy a state of post-emergence: our evolutionary tools have long since enabled us to emerge from the battle for survival waged under the rules of the natural world. For our purposes, this emergence can be understood as a liberation of our attention.
Winning this battle, however, came with a cost. Without this game of life and death, we suddenly had a deficit of structure within which we could derive meaning. After all, even for a species capable of asking “what’s the point?”, in a game of day to day survival there is no need to ask it. The point is to survive. If you don’t, it’s game over.
Thus, our ancestors collided headlong with a harsh truth: outside of the game of daily survival, purpose is simply not to be found in external circumstance. As outlined above, this is existentially problematic. Without purpose we are unable to fill the spaces of conscious experience with positive engagements of attention, and that is a prerequisite for a worthwhile existence.
Therefore, humans in the post-emergence world had two fundamental problems to solve:
1. Create purpose, in order to be able to …
2. Create positive ways to engage attention
To solve them, we began playing the great game of civilization. We used the tools of mind that allowed us to triumph over the trials of nature in order to build the world of man.
Our games had initial success in creating institutions that addressed the fundamental problem of purpose. Meaning was provided by political or religious institutions; the world was full of “bright and shiny things” provided by a king or religious authority, and the peasant’s purpose was to submit to them dutifully.4 the book All things Shining is an excellent read for more on this point If they didn’t, the promised consequences rivaled (or even exceeded) those in the realm of nature. While sure the most pleasant of arrangements, this at least relieved the individual of the burden of determining his own fate.
Further, along with establishing a baseline of purpose what we built also served as tremendous attention infrastructure. Through the remarkably transfiguring force of large-scale cooperation, we steadily generated a whole new universe of quality games to play.
It is a principal of our nature, however, that the more success we have, the more we must create in order continue addressing the fundamental problem of attention. This is due to the fact that humans are, at their core, problem solvers. The popular German expression “Der Weg ist das Ziel” (English: the journey is the reward), sums up the implications of this nicely.
The ultimate value of problem solving is not reaching a solution, but rather the pleasure of resting our attention in problem solving itself. In this context, the main problem with problem solving is that in its process problems are eventually solved.
This may sound paradoxical. However, upon closer inspection, it’s quite in line with our nature. It is no option for humans to exist idly – to simply resolve their most pressing issues and thereafter satisfy only the physical needs of their bodies – because this neglects the needs of the mind. Such a life would provide no means of directing attention at games that deliver positive engagement, something that the mind can’t tolerate without either great skill or great depression. 5 The skill in question here being that of mindfulness, which may be loosely defined as the intentional, meta direction of attention. One who is skillful in this way is uniquely capable of achieving a sense of well-being in idleness One can perhaps imagine a non-concious being solving the problem of daily survival and then simply existing until its inevitable deterioration. For a conscious being, this is not in the cards.
For this reason, success in our games forced us to keep marching through the levels. We were either locked into in a never-ending cycle of progress or spiraling into an ever-deeper pit of despair; of building higher and higher in the world of man or dwelling despondently in its dirty alleys.
As we steadily solved the problems of society – making breakthrough after breakthrough in political, social and natural science – many of the institutions that provided meaning were forced to evolve along with us. This eventually led to the enlightenment, and with it the values of civil liberty, autonomy and self-verification of truth. The result was a steady decline in subsidized purpose through church and state.
This decline has continued into the modern world, where we as individuals have an unprecedented level of autonomy to design our own lives. As we gain freedom, however, we also must take on the burden of meaning and attention anew. The modern individual is increasingly faced with the challenge of solving the two fundamental problems for himself.
As can be generally observed, without the right structure in place, this challenge reveals itself to be a harrowing one. There should be little doubt in our brave new world that he who is entirely unskillful in his ability to solve these problems on his own should fear true freedom just as he would fear the disappearance of all meaning, intrigue and opportunity for positive experience.
Attention and the Game of Self
The good news is, we already have all the tools needed not only to influence the outcome of this circumstance, but also to optimize it. The fruit of our previous labors provides a foundation of knowledge and resource that allows for a much greater scope of positive existence than the humans of the past.
On an individual level, the science of taking advantage of this opportunity runs in the background of all the decisions we make and all the subsequent games we play; it is a meta game, if you will. Because our skill in it depends on understanding, managing and evolving the particulars of our person, this game can be considered the game of self. Becoming skillful in the game of self is the closest thing we have to a perfect solution.
To determine the purpose of playing, we can recruit our logical faculty to understand the options available to us given open, indefinite time and the burden of freedom of attention and recognize it independently as the best one. The game of self yields the highest reward, optimizes the process of getting the most out of the time we have, and produces patterns of behavior that don’t just engage attention, but engage it optimally for us as individuals.
In this sense, the game of self is the process of creating customized solutions to the fundamental problems of our existence.
A simple thought experiment that serves as a quick way to evaluate how well you are already playing this game is to imagine that you had a totally open weekend ahead of you. There are no errands to run, no automatic ways to interact with other people and you have been invited to no engagements. Take a second to think about it. How would you schedule your time so as to get the most out of this weekend?
The first thing to realize here is that the things that occurred to you to do are essentially bets of what will engage your attention most positively. A skillful player at an advanced level of the game of self makes excellent bets. Additionally (and arguably even more importantly), she has developed a competence in the meta games (e.g. maintaining her energy mood and developing discipline) needed to execute on them. As a result, she can reliably expect to fill any free weekend to the brim with positive experience. How confident you are about being able to design such a weekend of your own (and, more importantly, longer instances of free time) is a rough measure of your own current skill in the game.
Thus, the better we are at the game of self, the better we are at directing a freshly liberated attention. The focus of this blog is to examine the nuances of this game in order to understand optimal gameplay.
Additional Thoughts – A Game of Fetch
I recently found myself on a camping trip in West Virginia. Together with four friends and three dogs, we drove out into the woods and set up camp for a three-day weekend. The four-legged enthusiasts that bounded joyfully around our campsite shared many similarities (they were all jet-black, of middling proportion and eager to explore the foreign, wild world around them) and yet were also of very different character.
This revealed itself shortly through the games that each sought to play. One set himself about sniffing around and exploring, straying the farthest from the campsite so that he often disappeared for hours at a time. The other, the smallest and meekest of the three, busied himself with seeking affection from those of us sitting around the fire, daring to explore beyond the boundaries of our encampment only with one of us as a guide.
The third, a German Shepard named Ares, was the most consistent in his preferred activity. Tirelessly, obstinately and – it must be said – almost perfectly annoyingly, he attempted to recruit us into playing fetch. His preferred object of pursuit was a small red frisbee that he would bound gleefully after into the brush… or press incessantly against our legs should he fail to recruit a means to throw it. When we after hours of this tireless bombardment set the frisbee high in branches out of his reach, he would promptly search and invariably find sticks of varying sizes to continue his assault. Humorously, much of the weekend sitting around that fire was characterized by intermittent pokes in the leg with slobber covered sticks.
Ares was, of course, not intending to annoy us with his game. Though his behavior might appear perplexing at first glance, when we consider the fundamental problems of conscious life, it is pretty easy to understand what might drive a dog to … well … doggedly insist on such a game.
In their emergence from the natural world, our ancestors brought dogs along with them as their preferred companions. Over centuries, they also directly influenced the course of their evolution to program them with certain traits that met various needs in their respective societies.
As a result, the modern dog faces a similar challenge as the modern individual. Having long since freed them from any pre-emergence concerns of hunting food and securing opportunity for procreation, we have recently also begun to decommission the various duties which they were bred to fulfill. Consider some of the traits characteristic of Ares’ breed:
German Shepherds are highly active dogs , and described in breed standards as self-assured. The breed is marked by a willingness to learn and an eagerness to have a purpose.
Is it any wonder that he spent the weekend poking our legs with sticks? Ares must do the same as we all must do; that is, to fill the spaces of his conscious experience with activities that engage his attention in ways that align with the particulars of his nature. This game of fetch that he seeks to play is the best he can do given his faculty of mind and the circumstances of his life.
In reflecting on such things, we can find great reason to be grateful for the tools that are unique to our species. Though we all face the same challenge as Ares, unlike him we have cognitive power which allows us to understand, diagnose and problem-solve this challenge in ways that he simply cannot. We can become the masters of our own games of fetch.
Because of this, we truly do hold the keys to beauty, love, interest and engagement.
And with them, to a good life.
And with that, to happiness.
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