tl;dr: Our attention is being extracted, depriving us of flow and creativity. Reclaiming it is key to resisting “techno-feudalism.” Mindfulness, digital sabbaths, and shared support structures like BOOST Your Practice can help us protect what matters most.

How would you describe the quality of your attention?

How distracted or distractable are you?

Do you remember how to focus?

How frequently do you get into a flow state?

How would you rate your digital hygiene?

Everywhere we turn we are told that our attention spans are diminishing. That we are having a hard time reading books, or even staying with video clips longer than a few seconds.

This is caused by our technology. Specifically by our phones. And there is a crisis among our young. We have humans who have never learned what it is to sustain their attention. Everyone is impacted. Even those of us who once knew the power of staying with something over time.

We know this. We even know what to do about it. But very, very few of us are finding the way, will and support to do what we need to do.

If a large diamond is cut up into pieces, it immediately loses its value as a whole; or if an army is scattered or divided into small bodies, it loses all its power; and in the same way a great intellect has no more power than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted, or diverted.
- Arthur Schopenhauer (h/t Tim Ferriss)

Our attention is interrupted, disturbed, distracted and diverted. Which is why we must reclaim and protect it. Because our attention is our currency. It is our economic currency, our political currency and our spiritual currency. This is why the richest and most powerful corporations that the world has ever seen are investing their resources and their unimaginable power to mine our most intimate data. They are always looking for better and better ways to extract our attention.

I propose that if we want to resist the growing power of techno-feudalism then the highest leverage move we can make is to reclaim the power of our attention.

I’m going to share a quote from a prophetic conversation with David Foster Wallace. Here, he tells us the challenge for our generation will be to build defenses against ways that make it:

More and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.

He says this is the challenge that will define us in the way that World War II defined its generation.

But before the quote, I want to remind you that BOOST Your Practice is one way in which we are experimenting with reclaiming our attention. BOOST is our effort to put first things first. It of course includes a mindfulness practice, which is arguably the best tool for training our attention.

But all the practices of BOOST are meant to nurture 45 minutes to an hour of uninterrupted creative work every single day. It is a structure of support designed to remind you of what it feels like to place yourself in full service to the muse. To allow the creative life force of the universe to move through you in whatever way your instrument is meant to play.

There is still time to join, we’ve been doing this for years, and it works!

I got this excerpt from Tim Ferriss’ *5-Bullet Friday* Newsletter. It is from a conversation between Rolling Stone’s David Lipsky and David Foster Weallace. *Note that it took place in 1996*, decades before virtual meetings, algorithmic feeds, and AI. It’s from the book *Means and Meaning* by Packy McCormick.

David Foster Wallace: As the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like— I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right?
Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.
David Lipsky: But you developed some defenses?
David Foster Wallace: No. This is the great thing about it is that probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up.
Maybe for our grandparents it was World War II. You know? For us, it’s gonna be that, at a certain point, that we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourselves about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?
And if we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.

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Tim Ferriss adds: To a great extent, I think analog is the antidote. Be sure to get your offline time in the calendar and protect it like you would the most important business meeting or family event of the year. Offline social time is non-negotiable for mental health in most people. We are not evolved to be screen creatures.

We are distracted. I am distracted. We hold a powerful technology in our pockets and it is so potent that it is literally changing our posture. Think about that!

The evolutionary pressures that turned us from apes into erect, bipedal humans took millions of years! But if you count the bygone days of the Blackberry, this rather unhealthy, hobbed over change in our body’s posture has taken about 25 years.

I’m not into alarmism or hysteria. But neither am I into anything that smells like turning away from what’s real. I don’t know what we are going to do. I know there are good practices, for example, my son has an app that makes him do squats or push-ups after being on snapchat too long. Other efforts include:

The Digital Sabbath
Turning your phone monochrome
Apps that make your phone work more like a flip phone
Actually getting a flip phone
Setting aside uninterrupted creative time
Setting phones aside during meals, social gatherings, or when spending time outside (you don’t really need to listen to a podcast on your walks!)
Remembering what it’s like to be together in person

These are good efforts.

Do you know of other ones? Write me about them. Or add your thoughts to the Substack comments.

Because I also know this. There is a BIG gap between knowing what we should do and actually doing it.

They say it takes discipline to change a habit and build a practice. But it takes a lot more than that. It takes support.
It takes small social structures that nurture changes that go counter to what the culture at large wants to make us do.

I’d love to know how you might be innovating in finding ways to reclaim our attention together.

We are going to keep digging into this together. In October after BOOST Your Practice, we are going to have a series of learning sessions, the first will be around Leviathan, the recent film from Studio Kainos, directed and produced by Alexander Beiner:

Leviathan draws on sociology, myth, psychology, economics and systems theory to delve into the deep code of culture and make sense of the times we live in. It’s a journey that invites the viewer to confront the shadows lurking at the heart of our systems, and points the way toward hope, healing and action.

Part of our effort to find our way through a time when an unprecedented, increasingly potent, attention extracting technology is redefining our engagement with life itself. We’ll gather Thursday, October 16 from 3PM to 4:30PM East. Click here to register.

The Power of Attention