On Attention
Much has been made of the attention economy’s deleterious effects on society. The capitalistic theft of our ability to pay attention has been credited as a cause of the rise of Trump, a contributor to mass shootings, and even the biggest problem facing the West today. It is difficult, if not impossible, to say whether any of these claims are true, but they tend to feel correct, or at least good, in large part because most of us agree that our inability to pay attention feels so very bad.
Which begs the question: why does the inability to pay attention feel so bad? A by now classic answer is that we feel bad because we’re less productive as a result of our inattention. But, even if it’s correct, this isn’t a helpful answer, because it is only in service of the original problem, e.g. the capitalist control of our minds. Other potential answers include the intellectual approach, e.g. that we can no longer be mentally still long enough to enjoy a movie, or a painting, or a concert, or the creative approach, i.e. that we can no longer be mentally still long enough to finish a piece of writing, or riff with our friends, or even tell our children a bed-time story.
And while the intellectual and creative answers are, perhaps, a little less icky, they still aren’t particularly satisfying. Most people throughout most of history were not going about enjoying art, let alone attempting to create it. And while those people might have felt bad for lots of other reasons (extreme lack of food or shelter, extreme surplus of war and pestilence), it seems safe to say that they didn’t feel bad because they couldn’t pay attention. In fact, their ability to pay attention is probably what kept them from feeling as bad as we might expect them to, given the aforementioned presence and lacks.
“Well, sure, because prior to thirty years ago no one had a smartphone in their pocket trying to take over their brain. Paying attention was a lot easier.” This, too, is a classic answer, but it, too, isn’t all that helpful, in part because one has to work with what one is given, in part because having a smartphone is, in fact, a choice, and in part because it is focused on what those in the past didn’t have — the smartphone — and not what they did have — God. For it is this, above all, that we have lost to the attention economy. And it is this, above all, that we most need. For with God, all things are possible. Even paying attention. But we are a nation that is losing its access to God, in record numbers.
To be Godless in America is no longer the travesty, insult, or even crime that it once was. Or, as the Pew Research Center so nicely put it in their 2012 report on religiosity in America, “‘Nones’ on the rise”.[1] This report found that one-fifth of Americans (or two in ten, which will be a useful comparator later) did not identify themselves with any religion, putting them in the sociotheological category of “nones”. Admittedly, this data was somewhat skewed, in that while 30% of so-called Older Millennials and 34% of their Young compatriots were unaffiliated with any major religion, only 21% of Gen X and 15% of Boomers considered themselves to be without attachment to a belief system (the percentage of those members of the Silent and Greatest generations who maintained their autonomy dipped into the single digits).[2]
Nine years later the Pew Research Center found that the country’s number of “nones” had increased by almost 50%; nearly three-in-ten Americans of any age no longer considered themselves associated with a firm religion, or, more precisely, agreed that they were of “no religion” as of the 2021 report.[3] (This is not to say that either the 20% from 2012 or the 29% from 2021 are atheists, or even agnostics; indeed, a scant 10% of Americans identify as atheist or agnostic as of the 2021 report.) There is a dearth of data on Gen Z and Gen Alpha individuals, but the Pew Research Center estimates that “Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades” and that more than 40% of Americans will live their lives without any religion in it.[4]
Predictions like this are immensely difficult to make. They rely on the extreme extrapolation of data from small sample sizes, and must incorporate large disparities in religious practice based on race, gender, socioeconomic status, and myriad other demographics that are constantly being affected by factors outside the US, be it mass immigration that brings with it centuries of strict Catholicism or Islam, or the genocidal efforts of Hamas and Israel that lead heretofore secular individuals to wholeheartedly embrace the religion assigned to them at birth. But there is another major contributor to one’s religion, or the lack thereof, that the statisticians are failing to consider: attention. For attention is the foundation upon which religion is built. The ability to believe in a higher power, the ability to focus one’s thoughts on something as marvelous as a God or gods, necessarily requires the skill that is attention. And so, with the rise of two generations that have grown up at the whims of the so-called attention economy, it seems reasonable to wonder if the percentage of the future population that will have, quite literally, been screened out of theism, is a whole lot higher than the statisticians are expecting.
There is, of course, the question of whether what has just been posited is true, or even accurate. There is also the question of what we mean by God. I, a devout atheist, absolutely do not mean that God, the Abrahamic dude in the sky. No, I mean the Murdochian God, proposed in the essay On God and Good, first published back in 1969, two years before the term attention economy was published by Herbert A Simon.[5] (Murdoch presented On God and Good as a lecture at Bowdoin a full five years before Simon’s coining, but presumably to a rather small audience.)
In this essay, Murdoch gave us a rigorous definition of God, one that would turn out to be shockingly prescient and relevant to our lives fifty years later: “I shall suggest that God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention…” (emphasis hers).[6] Not content with solving a dilemma that has frustrated theologians for millennia, Murdoch went on to suggest that “moral philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept which has all these characteristics.”[7]
She further went on to examine each aspect of her definition, and did so brilliantly. What she couldn’t do — because despite the lamentations of each prior generation about their heirs, it was impossible to know in the 1960’s that capitalism would one day achieve its goal of controlling our minds — was raise the question of what it would mean to be not just unwilling but unable to have an object of attention. The rest of the definition is useful, of course, but the remaining adjectives hinge on the existence of the object of attention; without that, the modifiers are little more than so many screams into the existential void.
For this is what is terrifying about the members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, arguably the majority of Millennials, and a good portion of Boomers and beyond: they (we?) truly no longer have the ability to have necessarily real objects of attention. Of course, there could be any number of reasons for this lost skill. Some would argue that the younger generations have simply fallen prey to nihilism. (Who are these some, you may ask, to which I might respond, do you want to start with Plato or with Turgenev?) One version of this argument says that we (they?) are simply too atheistic, too agnostic, too un- and irreligious to be good, moral citizens. This, you may have noticed, is the argument that dates back to Plato.
A kinder argument, or at least one more versed in reality, is to some extent an update of what Turgenev struggled with in Fathers and Sons, i.e. education cannot help but beget nihilism; with access to information comes a certain amount of moral relativity, which is little more than a modern reworking of immorality. In this argument, the actual issue at hand is the constant exposure to atrocity, terrorism, and death. Once upon a time you might only know, or know of, a handful of people who died in your lifetime (dependent, of course, on where you lived, how dense an area you lived in, whether you lived in a time of war, etc.). More recently, you might have heard of the thousands of people dying “over there” in whatever war was being fought somewhere across the world, but even then, you likely found out about all that sadness once a day, in the paper or on the nightly news, if you found out at all. [This is, of course, a very Euro/Anglo/Ameri-centric imagining on my part. Please bear with me.] Even if you were a well-informed person, it simply wasn’t possible that you could receive a notification every ten minutes when another child was murdered by Israeli bombardments in Gaza.[8] And so, the argument goes, it is merely that we lack the ability to care this much; our little unevolved brains are simply incapable of assimilating the terabytes of data that we are confronted with on a daily basis, no matter how ghastly and important that data might be.
While this is a better argument, or at least a more gracious one, I don’t think it bears out. Ask a teenager about the fifteen group conversations they’re maintaining throughout the day, a twenty-something about the eleven people they’re talking to on various dating apps, or a thirty-something about the eight op-eds (née news articles) they read that morning. Decent odds they can all tell you a fair amount. Humans may not have fully caught up with the rate of information, but we’re pretty good at adjusting to new technologies, especially the younger we are (think back to children operating VCRs, DVD players, or early personal computers for their parents).
All that said, there are likely just as good odds that very, very few of the people in those age groups can tell you the last time they sat down and read for an hour straight, or talked to one person about a single topic for more than ten minutes, or had dinner without looking at a screen of some sort. They are, of course, to be blamed for this lack of discipline, this willful attention deficit disorder, having fully engaged with and bought into social media and screen time, things that are by no means requirements for life, things that can easily be chosen against.
Except for the part where they absolutely are not to be blamed for this, because it is screamed from the rooftops that these things are requirements for a well-informed life, and that they are so perfectly designed that choosing against them is a bit like saying it’s easy to choose against using heroin, despite the fact that someone has forcibly mainlined USDA certified Grade A smack into your veins for most, or even all of your life. Not all choices can be equally chosen.
It is, therefore, more accurate to say that we have had our ability to pay attention stolen from us. This is not a novel argument, and much smarter people than me have written far more intelligent words about it. It still bears repeating: Facebook, Google, and Twitter (these are still their names, no matter what they want you to believe), are unashamedly evil corporations whose sole reason for existence is the furthering of the dystopian capitalist nightmare that they have tri-handedly converted the Internet into. (If I didn’t mention TikTok it’s because I have never used TikTok, and I don’t think it exists without Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube before it.)
What might be a novel argument is that along with this confiscation of our eyes, thumbs, and minds, the Big Tech horde took parts of our souls. For isn’t this what it must mean to not be able to pay attention anymore? To no longer be capable of having a god or God? How many people have been forcibly converted by the algorithms, driven into the loveless arms of an existentialism that they are, by design, incapable of reckoning with, made into soulless content consumers that are no longer capable of conceiving of, let alone living a life suffused with or by God or Good? How many nones, against their will, are on the rise?
This is, of course, a question that can’t really be answered, but perhaps we can find clues that point us towards a possible solution. The Pew Research Center’s 2021 report found that only 45% of all Americans say they pray on a daily basis (as compared to 58% in 2007, which, interestingly, is the year the iPhone came out).[9] Indeed, nearly a full third (32%) of U.S. adults reported that they “seldom or never pray,” a 78% increase in spiritual silence from 2007.[10] [If these numbers are surprising to you, it’s likely because you’re a member of the audience that would read this sort of essay in the first place; remember the South, the Midwest, and all the belief that runs rampant in those states.] By returning to Murdoch (who borrowed from Simone Weil) we can use these numbers as a surrogate for (dis)belief, for she proposed that “Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God…”[11]
This definition and these statistics do beg the question of primacy, of whether we have stopped praying because we no longer believe in God, or whether we no longer believe in God because we have stopped praying. But this assumes a neat chronology, or at least that these are sequential events, when they are in fact simultaneous ones; one cannot pray without belief, and one cannot actively believe without prayer. (There is the exception, perhaps, of moments of conversion, those metaphysical cries for help that are alleged to result in sudden belief. Here again, Murdoch provides clarity: “By the time the moment of choice has arrived the quality of attention has probably determined the nature of the act.”[12] If you were in a place such that you were willing to cry out to God, then whatever doubt you had about its existence was Thomasonian at best; your attention already made you an aspiring apostle.)
‘Okay, but prayer is necessarily religious, with all of the historical and social complications that come with those religions. Maybe people are meditating instead, which has certainly become a more mainstream practice.’ This is a good point, and fortunately one that the Pew Research Center thought of in its 2014 Religious Landscape Study. Even then — two years before the rise of TikTok, a mere four years into Instagram’s reign — a scant 9% of Younger Millennials said that they meditated at least once a week, as opposed to the 35% of Baby Boomers who were regular practitioners. If you graph the data, you can literally see the drop off with age.[13]
If we accept that time itself can undergo inflation, such that the number of years required to create new generations is inversely related to the advent of new technologies, then the decade separating 2014 and 2024 may well be equivalent to twenty or thirty years in the 1900’s, making this dataset painfully outdated. We could then look at the fact that the company behind the eponymous meditation app Calm has a two-billion-dollar valuation (whatever that increasingly nebulous term means), and reasonably conclude that the market share of wannabe meditators is actually quite large, that far more people than Pew could have predicted are now interested in this act of attention.[14] (Though we should probably ask whether trying to hone your ability to pay attention by using an app on the thing that is trying to steal your attention in the first place is really all that compatible with finding a God or The Good.)
But if we look closer, we will note that Calm has a paltry (though much lauded) four million users who are willing to pay for it, with an additional ten million workers who “now have free access to the app as a mental-health benefit.”[15] Headspace, Calm’s most serious competitor, is reported to have 3.3 million users and 2100 partnered companies who can offer the app to their employees.[16] Even if we were to assume that all of these users are actively using the app (instead of having purchased it in a momentary fit of self-improving pique), that all or nearly all of them are American (this is incorrect, as it has been reported that the US accounts for ~60% of the meditation app market, but it allows for a simpler back of the napkin calculation), and that roughly the same number of people are actively using competitor apps or free versions of Calm and Headspace, that would mean that not even 5% of the U.S. is using an app for guided meditation.[17] For comparison, 150 million Americans — 10 times the generously inflated number of meditation app users, and nearly half the country’s population — use TikTok.[18]
Americans may want to meditate, or, perhaps more accurately, they may want to want to meditate, but their intentions have been ruined by their (in)attention. For if there is an opposite of meditation, surely scrolling TikTok (or Instagram, or YouTube, or whatever) is high on the list of antitheses, and it is this, in record numbers, that an astounding plurality of Americans are engaged in on a daily basis.
There is no world wherein any of us beat Big Tech at their own game. Contrary to whatever bullshit they might try and sell us via screen time limitations and Bricks and all these other technological ways of controlling our interactions with technology, these corporations and their supporters are very much trying to ruin our ability to pay attention. This could be for reasons as simple as greed, as they steal our data and figure out better ways to market to each individual, thereby increasing their ad revenues. But I enjoy a good tin-foil hat and am prone to believe that there are probably additional, and more nefarious reasons, like ending democracy as we know it and rushing in fascist dictators worldwide, to thereby increasing their ad revenues. (For what it’s worth, it seems that Dame Murdoch tended to agree with me on this, when she wrote that “Democracies can perish because in the end people don’t believe in anything and don’t revere anything.”[19])
But there is a world wherein I quote Iris one last time:
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“As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer’s mind.”[20]
The idea that I would like to turn into a consolation, to thereby falsify, is the idea that we can’t pay attention. (This is, in fact, a consolation, insofar as it is disappointing to realize that we must reclaim our agency, for agency is hard, and onerous, and damning, but that same disappointment necessarily leads to (some) comfort in knowing that we are not doomed to be non-agential.) Sure, we’ve lost the game against Big Tech, but the loss only matters if we continue to play their game. An economy, attention or otherwise, only exists if there are buyers and sellers in that economy.
To watch bad Netflix movies that have been written in order to summarize themselves to the viewer, based on the expectation that the viewer is not paying attention, is to participate in that economy. To put on hip-hop BBQ while you do “work” (this is not a slight against you, dear reader, it is a slight against capitalism), is to participate in that economy. To text while you drive, to play Candy Crush on the subway, to listen to an audiobook to fall asleep, all of these are to participate in that economy. Which is to say: all of these are methods of practicing the inability to pay attention. Practice makes perfect. But is failure what we wish to perfect?
There is no partial participation in such an economy. Trying to say “Oh, I’ll only use Instagram for thirty minutes a day” is a bit like me trying to say “Oh, I’ll just have the one drink” while full well-knowing that, for me, there is no such thing as just one drink. Abstinence for substance use may not be the correct solution for everyone, but it seems all but impossible that it isn’t the correct solution when it comes to attention (mis)use. The nones must rise.
But what are we to rise to? In the Year of the Lord/the Hijrah/the World 2025/1447/5786, is it possible to propose that we rise to a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention? Which is to say, to God?
Unfortunately, I won’t provide an answer to that question. I have one, but I don’t think telling it to you would be of any help; your correct answer must, in fact, be yours. It needn’t be unique, for many people (yours truly included) have the same answer — be it the Abrahamic God, or Art, or Love, or whatever — but I do believe that it has to be decided upon individually. Without that decision, your god cannot be a necessarily real object, not to you anyway.
Which means that, in the end, I’m only really telling you something that you’ve heard time and again: just delete your apps. The difference is, or at least I hope it is, that I’m not saying you should do so simply because they’re bad. I’m saying you should do so because you have the sovereign, human right to pay attention. You have the sovereign, human right to choose whether you believe in anything. Maybe, with that right, you’ll still decide to be an atheist; I know I did. But at least you’ll be an atheist by choice. At least you’ll have chosen your own God. Your own Good.
[1] Pew Research Center, “Nones” on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation.
[2] Ibid
[3] Smith, “About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated.”
[4] Pew Research Center, “Modeling the Future of Religion in America.”
[5] Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World
[6] Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, 344.
[7] Ibid
[8] Nichols, “A Child Killed on Average Every 10 Minutes in Gaza, Says WHO Chief.”
[9] Smith, “About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated.”
[10] Ibid
[11] Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, 344.
[12] Murdoch, 354.
[13] Pew Research Center, “Frequency of Meditation — Religion in America: U.S. Religious Data, Demographics and Statistics.”
[14] Tan, “Calm Hits $2 Billion Value With Lightspeed, Goldman, TPG Backing.”
[15] Espada, “Calm Is One of the 2022 TIME100 Most Influential Companies.”
[16] Curry, “Headspace Revenue and Usage Statistics (2023).”
[17] Curry, “Calm Revenue and Usage Statistics (2023).”
[18] TikTok Newsroom, “Celebrating Our Thriving Community of 150 Million Americans.”
[19] Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, 467.
[20] Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, 346
