Attention

Millennials, we still have a chance. Do we have a purpose large enough to warrant the effort to overcome distractions?

Your mind is a resource. You “pay” attention. The premium goods of life tend to have a higher cost; starting a business, raising a family, reading a book, writing a book, exercising, building a 5 and 10 year plan, performing well at work. The list of premium high-cost goods you can pay for with your attention is smaller than the list of low grade commodities. There are many things you can pay attention to that require very little investment; snacking, doom scrolling, fast food, sitting, X, YouTube, YouTube shorts, Instagram, Instagram reels, TikTok (yikes dude!), video games, the news (without doing your own research), Substack notes… basically everything on your phone.

Our minds are a special type of bank account. The amount of cash we can store in our account is proportional to the average withdrawals we make from it. Consistently pulling large sums of cash from our attention account will “magically” raise the limit of how much we can pay for any task. If we don’t have a practice of demanding large transactions of our attention, then the average size of those transactions decreases, and our account capacity shrinks. The more we watch reels, the more costly reading a whole book seems (because, guess what, it is).

What am I paying for? I assume I’m not too dissimilar to others in my millennial coming of age. I did elementary school research projects with physical Encyclopedias, but by the end of high school I was using Wikipedia. College, 09-13, saw a robust incorporation of online resources, as well as the boom of Facebook (as if we needed social media while living like sardines in the dorms). As a Millennial, I learned to walk before cell-phone screens lit the path to the couch. But when the time came to grow up and get my sea-legs beneath me, the fairy lights of social media and entertainment danced all around, beckoning me off into the mist. What’s in the mist? That couch.

I have this sense that I’ve been called off to this grand adventure of life, where the possibilities are endless, but the fairy lights are so distracting. Dis tracting… Getting off the traction of purpose, meaning, vision. I feel something like rage welling up within me when I think about the numerous snares, snags, traps, fetters, chains, coils and cuffs that wind round my mind, pulling it back to the couch. Damn them!

You know why it is so hard to write consistently (you (me), out there, you person who wants to be more intentional with your time, sensing that there is some buried treasure lost in the vast open space of possibilities in your future)? Because writing is a premium good. You can’t pay for it with a bank account that caps at 5 second intervals. It requires that you pay in hours. And that is hard.

It is hard for me. Because I’ve been paying for YouTube. Literally and metaphorically. I’ve known it for years; the habitual consumption of YouTube has slowly degraded my attention span. Not only have the practices of reading, writing, cooking, and exercising become more difficult, but the truly meaningful guideposts of life purpose and vision are becoming obscured in the mist. It feels like a hollowing out, a diminishment. I have this sense that something very valuable is being stripped away, but that something even worse than that is approaching; that even the awareness of the loss is at stake. There is a memory of being able to pay large sums of attention for quality goods and experiences. How many years of wasted time will it take to loose even the memory of well spent time?

Millennials. Think about the older generation that couldn’t escape the TV. Don’t ignore the warning. I have a friend who’s dad sits in front of the TV watching news all day, and simply repeats back what he heard to whoever is in the room. Like he’s making some sort of discovery. There’s just not a whole lot going on there. We know that that mind isn’t living to the full. Walk! Meditate! Read a flipping book! Do anything you can to raise the limit on your bank account! I do not want to be chained to the couch by a mind that can no longer stand on its own.

An adjacent concept to attention is moderation. The metaphor of attention being like cash in a bank account has its limitations. Moderation fills out the corners of that metaphor and coheres nicely with the dopaminergic pathways of the mind. Social media, video games, snacks, entertainment, and comfort are all easy paths to cheap stimulation and the accompanying dopamine hit. The more they are engaged with, the less capacity one has to resist them. The beauty of moderation is that it heightens sensitivity to dopamine. By denying impulses and frequent stimuli, one can improve both the receptivity to dopamine and the ability to focus on long term tasks that have a higher benefit. For example, I spent nearly two months eating no processed sugars. Then, thanks to my mother-in-law, I had the chance to go on a New Years eve date with my wife. We got double scoops of Salt-n-Straw ice cream. It was unbelievable. It tasted so good! It was like heaven on earth.

And in so many words all I am really saying is what has been said countless times before; “do hard things.” Hard things were easier to do when there were only hard things to do. Two discoveries jumpstarted my recent abstinence from YouTube (and the selling of my beloved xbox… that one hurt. Sorry Friday night halo buddies). First, as stated above, was the recognition that the habitual use of easy access entertainment, even under the guise of “educational content”, was eroding my ability to focus. Second, I had an epiphany regarding my susceptibility to distractions; lack of vision.

I’m not here for a therapy session, nor to write a confessional. I’m waking up to the reality that I made a bad trade many years ago, and that its time get my vision back. Sometime towards the end of high school (and I’ve got specific moments in mind), I lost purpose. I began to say things in my head like “what’s the point of trying so hard? Why try to get good grades? So I can go to college? And then what? Get a stupid job to earn money?” Everything became so empty and meaningless to me, but I didn’t understand how dangerous casting away purpose was. I wanted to feel something, and this new and dramatic uncaring cynicism protected me from the pain of trying hard and failing, arming me with a costly defense.

What this new blindness didn’t defend me from was the slow unravelling of productive disciplines and habits (thank God I had those habits in the first place). Without vision, belief, purpose, hope and meaning for life, the effort to remain moderate in the face of pleasures and focused in the face of distractions became increasingly nonsensical. As the Ecclesiastes writer himself says, “If tomorrow we die, then eat, drink, and be merry!”

I’m not writing my whole story here. I’m exposing a thread that’s woven its way in my life. That thread, God let it be, is being snipped out of the tapestry in this season. There are many things I love to do; read, write, run, climb, make music, work, and play with my kids. All of those things have been in jeopardy because of the corrosive lack of vision and meaning for my life. Having listened to many luminaries of our day, (eg. Jordan Peterson, Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, Tom Bilyeu, Iian McGilchrist, Bill Johnson, Kris Vallotton, Steve Backlund) I’ve become convinced that the cost of my willful blindness is too high. It won’t just cost me, it will cost my wife and my children and everyone else that I could uplift through my life and work.

What are you paying for with your attention? Do you feel that it is time to invest in things that truly matter? I pray you do. God help us.