Meditation and mindfulness have received a lot of public attention in recent years. Even just the “mentions” charts for the terms in Google seem to line up perfectly with my personal experience hearing the words in both media and normal social communication:
Despite how these words have entered into our lexicon, I don’t think we have grasped what these practices are really for and what they can do. Not to say that I have it figured out, but I wonder if these skills will be critical to human flourishing alongside technology. It certainly seems so in the future as I imagine it.
One of the most important things to know about meditation is that it’s not about perfection. It’s not the complete domination of mind so that you turn off all thoughts and go into a mythical monk state.
Meditation is about attention redirection.
Perhaps it’s all we have left to fight with if companies continue to pursue “the bottom of the brain stem” with engagement algorithms and psychology-hacking techniques.
Attention is our OP tool, because when we are directing (or redirecting) our attention towards our craft, our work, or our creative pursuits, we make monumental progress. “Putting our mind to it” may well be a phrase moving out of the cliché and into wisdom as we learn how to coexist with technology that attempts to deactivate the mind.
Focus and attention have always made the difference in whatever humans have pursued. It is not a commodity nor an infinite resource. It can’t be multiplied or scaled. Instead, we must treat it with greater respect and reverence.
Attention is a Currency
Since the advent of social media—and especially, the algorithmic incentivization of engagement and retention—a new currency has joined the market: attention. It has probably always been part of the market, but it’s never been more potent and easily accessible, in my opinion, especially to small businesses and creators.
The social media game has three players: The company, the consumers, and the creators. The company owning the social media platform (e.g. Facebook) must gain and retain as much attention as possible to scale profits through advertising. The users of the platform either exchange their attention for dopamine rewards or create content that gains and retains attention, which is rewarded with a small cut of the advertising fee paid to the social media company.
Never before has the phrase “pay attention” been more literal. The things we direct our attention to are now actual economic exchanges. This means that even our passive scrolling on social media is a monetary payment to the platform through the ads it shows in the brief interaction we’ve had.
The odd part of this is that the economic exchange is not symmetrical. The social media company receives money, but what was paid was arguably more costly.
If our attention is a scarce resource, when we divert it from a productive or purposeful venue to a cheap entertainment venue, we aren’t just losing the time, but also the value of our attention. More value has been collected by a third-party, and less value is left for our own benefit.
I see this when I get sucked into a Reels-binging session on Instagram and then try to get back to work. It’s often very disorienting to switch to a more cognitively intense task. But I wonder if there is an ancient solution to this modern problem?
Not even Instagram Reels and other short-form content can keep up with the speed of thoughts that swirl in my head at times. If the problem isn’t so much about the amount of information in front of me but whether I can redirect my attention to what matters, then it sounds an awful lot like the experience of meditation.
As we meditate, we will have thoughts. Our arm might go numb or our face will get itchy. We will get distracted. That’s not a failure.
We will use social media. We will get trapped in a scrolling session watching adorable cat videos. That’s not a failure.
Instead, we are being intentional with our actions. We make the choice to engage, and then, perhaps, we train ourselves to be able to exit the engagement on our own terms. It’s the escape from these attention hacking places that matters.
Presence
Staying embodied—feeling my feelings, especially the negative and uncomfortable ones—is very difficult for me. I would prefer to only feel good feelings and entirely numb the rest of the angry, sad, and hurt feelings.
In a similar way, the design of short-form content feeds gives us the illusion of staying in the good-feeling state, mostly by taking us out of an embodied experience. It’s a distraction. Our attention is no longer in the present. It’s as if it’s suspended in something else.
Meditation is supposed to be a way to train our attention. It creates the skills to be able to continuously redirect our attention back to our goal or focus. Can it help us solve our technological conundrum? Can we use the same techniques we learn in meditation to intentionally direct and redirect our attention when something else is desperately vying to be in control?