I have been back from Italy for over a week now, processing what made the time so magical. The obvious things were the location in Cortona, the homemade food at every meal, the thoughtful yoga, and great company.
But another ingredient made that week even greater than the sum of parts. I struggled last week to find the word for it. And then I found it. The ingredient was attention.
We had real conversations—sometimes 1:1 and sometimes in a group—and we listened without the distractions of laptops, Slack, kids, barking dogs, meeting alerts, texts, sirens, traffic, construction noise, or partners. We paid physical attention to ourselves and each other and socialized in ways that felt soothingly antique in our tech-forward world.
Only on coming home did I realize how thirsty I have been—and maybe we are collectively—for this kind of real-life, undivided attention to each other. Then, like clockwork, Ezra Klein (swoon, always) had a podcast on attention and what’s happened to it.
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show “Your Mind is Being Fracked” pointed to how deep it’s going; it’s shifting entire generations because our attention can be easily monetized. What’s happening on your phone and in your inbox is not just recreational scrolling but is the “coerced rearrangement of desire.”
I can testify that my own attention is, at best, like a cracked glaze on a ceramic mug. That process in pottery is called crazing. Perfect. We are all crazing. As I wrote about exactly a year ago, the iPhone and social media are brain killers. Don’t I know it. Too often, I find myself lost in Reels for tens of minutes at a time, watching upsetting Russian plastic surgery videos or shirtless cowboys dancing to Texas Hold ‘Em, or strange pairings of farm animals licking each others’ ears. I would like to point to perimenopause as the culprit to my shortening midlife attention span but the reality is that it’s probably the cumulative 20,000+ minutes last year I spent on social media (estimating 60 minutes a day) and more like 72,000 minutes on Slack (estimating 6 hours a day for 200 days).
But here’s the good news: There is a solution. (My favorite four words!) That’s where the sustained practice of yoga has never felt so important. Or the sustained practice of art. Or meditation. Or reading real books. Or going on a retreat in Italy with real people to eat real food. One of the most beautiful ways I have heard long-term sobriety described is the practice of sustained attention to oneself. The practice of attention has been baked into the design of all these things.
Ezra’s podcast guest, Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett said:
Each of those spaces, spaces of religion and institutions of education, study, teaching, and learning, and then museums and spaces of artistic production, symphonies, music, each of those institutions has meaningful traditions of non-instrumentalizable attention.
It feels like a key code to sanity for the coming years: Find the places where there are traditions of paying attention in ways that cannot be instrumentalized.
xoxo Cat
This! Yes!
That's good!