In these edgy and ominous days, anyone suggesting that it might be wise to pay a bit less attention to the dramas of presidential politics is likely to receive a tongue lashing. Even to contemplate the idea exudes an unrealistic escapism; maybe some can afford not to care too much about the outcome, but surely most can’t. Besides, it just feels impossible: We’re transfixed — whichever candidate you intend to vote for — by the potential for catastrophe, like rabbits caught in headlights.
Would it make any difference if I told you that learning to steward your attention — and even to withdraw it from urgent matters like politics that seem to cry out for it — is the truly hardheaded, non-escapist approach required at this moment? And that doing so might even be your civic responsibility?
I’m certainly not suggesting you refrain from voting or election volunteering or discussing politics. Nor am I endorsing a certain kind of self-help guru who recommends disconnecting from the news entirely, on the grounds that it doesn’t affect your life. What I’m arguing, having written two books exploring the benefits of embracing our built-in human limitations, is that it’s permissible — indeed, essential — to carve out space in our days for other vital things, both for the sake of our inner equilibrium and for the health of democracy.
An old anecdote tells of the French philosopher Raymond Aron, strolling through Paris on a glorious day with his wife and newborn daughter when suddenly, amid the happy crowds soaking up the sunlight in the Jardin du Luxembourg, he spots his fellow scholar Simone Weil, visibly distraught. Aron asks what’s wrong. “There is a strike in Shanghai,” Weil responds, “and the troops fired on the workers.”
It isn’t to gainsay Weil’s awe-inspiring openness to every current event and its emotional impact to observe that few of us could function this way. Attention is a finite resource, and our sanity depends on not struggling to care about everything. We must protect a zone of focus for the local and personal — the feeling of the sun on your skin, a conversation with friends over pasta or an exchange of terrible jokes with your 7-year-old.
In an attention economy, the truly valuable commodity isn’t the news itself but your eyeballs. Even the most responsible media organization, activist group or political campaign is incentivized to present each story or cause as even more alarming than the next, in an effort to win the attentional arms race. It’s easy to find yourself, metaphorically speaking, living inside the news cycle — treating the latest campaign developments or polling data as somehow more real than your home, career, neighborhood or friends. It’s a grim irony that many people thus mesmerized by the news feel themselves to be fighting for democracy’s survival, when the total colonization of inner life by politics is a traditional hallmark of totalitarianism.
It would be one thing if this nervous fixation at least helped us make a difference in the wider world. And it can seem that way: Scrolling, sharing and refreshing on social media certainly simulates the feeling of efficacy, as if you’re acting on the news, not just watching it in slack-jawed panic.
But the attempt to care about everything impedes taking concrete action on anything. The admonishment that if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention belongs to an era when attention was abundant. What our current era demands, by contrast, is often a willingness to withhold attention, even from some causes and stories that matter, and to be willing to pick battles. Doing so will make you more effective as a volunteer, activist or donor in whatever battles you do pick while retaining your ability to assert primacy over your own mind.
The other sense in which our anxieties represent a failure to reckon with human limitation is that what we’re worried about lies in the future, even if the election is just a couple of days away. And yet the future always escapes our attempts to feel secure about it because we’re hopelessly trapped in the present, unable to really know what’s coming next. Here, too, there’s solace to be found in learning to reel in one’s attention, from speculation about what might happen to what’s happening now. Even when the future fills you with foreboding, your only option, and thus your only responsibility, as Carl Jung observed, is to do “the next and most necessary thing.”
The truth we could do with relearning is that struggling to transcend our fundamental limits — by trying to feel certain about the future, wanting to take in all the world’s suffering or willing the election to go our way — gets in the way of our doing the most that we actually can. In the limit-embracing mode of being, we can do our part as citizens of a world in crisis yet still stake out attentional space for the other things that count: family, contemplation, noticing how the leaves change color on the trees.
Uncertainty is never over; meaning and joy have to be found right in the middle of it, if they’re ever to be found at all. This aspect of the human condition is undoubtedly an uncomfortable one. But as the American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck reportedly liked to say, what makes it unbearable is our mistaken belief that it can be cured.
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