Attention: one of the last sincere forms of love

In the contemporary digital era, we often hear that we are living within an “attention economy”: a society organized around the capture of cognitive resources for market gain. As Nick Seaver puts it, “attention has come to seem naturally economic — it is limited, hence valuable, and thus a target for accumulation.” Much of the conversation around attention stays within that logic. Attention is framed as a scarce commodity, something to be extracted, measured, optimized, and sold. But I find myself drawn to another question Seaver raises: “How do people use the idea of attention to interpret the world and make claims about what is important to them?” That, to me, feels like the more human question. Because attention is not only something that can be taken from us, it is also one of the ways we reveal what matters. Where attention goes, energy follows. What we return to and protect may say more about us than what merely captures us. In that sense, attention may be one of the last sincere forms of love.



We often speak about attention through the language of depletion. Gloria Mark frames it as finite: we begin the day with a full tank, and distraction drains it; that metaphor feels increasingly true. By the end of the day, so many of us reach for our phones under the guise of rest. We tell ourselves we are too tired to think, that we just want to shut our brains off and scroll. But the infinite scroll offers a strange counterfeit of restoration. It occupies attention without renewing it, or in other words, it keeps the mind active without allowing it to settle. What feels like rest is often only the illusion of it — a modern inversion of leisure in which exhaustion is prolonged.



If attention is ours, then it is worth asking where it goes after the device is gone. What remains when there is no feed to absorb us? What do we give ourselves to when nothing is being engineered to capture us?



Some of the most personal moments of my day happen early in the morning, in the ritual of making espresso. I have made the process deliberately arduous. I weigh the beans, grind them to the right size, distribute the grounds evenly, and pull the shot by hand according to a timed formula I arrived at through trial and error. None of this is efficient, which is part of the point. The ritual asks something of me. It forces intention within constraint. And because I approach it carefully, it gives something back: a better drink … and maybe also a brief experience of full presence. When something is treated as special, it often returns that care in kind.



I’ve started to think the same way about attention in other parts of my life, like at the gym. For years, my workouts followed almost identical patterns: long sessions, high volume, constant effort, the assumption that more was always better. Burnout was simply folded into the routine. There were days when I was technically there for an hour and a half or two hours, but not truly present in what I was doing. I was moving, but only partially engaged, going through the motions at a fraction of my actual capacity. But what changed was surprisingly simple — I began doing less. I shortened the workouts and pushed harder within a smaller frame. Instead of overriding what my body was telling me, I listened to it. “This is too much.” “You are not recovering.” “You are not actually giving your full effort this way.” Once I adjusted, the result was surprising. More focus, more intensity, more responsiveness, more strength. In a strange way, reducing the quantity allowed for a fuller form of attention. It felt less like discipline in the punishing sense and more like deliberate care. 



We live with the fantasy that infinite access should make us better thinkers and more informed as people, but the brain can only metabolize so much. We do not flourish under endless input. There is a threshold after which more stops deepening experience and starts thinning it out.

So lately I’ve been wondering whether love, at least in one of its less obvious forms, looks a lot like limitation; a careful choosing, instead of abundance without end. Reading for forty minutes instead of three hours. Narrowing research to the three most salient ideas instead of drowning in twenty tabs. Going to the gym five times a week instead of seven. Giving more care to fewer things, and protecting the conditions under which presence becomes possible. To treat your time and your energy as something worth caring for. 



In a culture that so often rewards fragmentation, there is something unexpectedly radical about learning to attend with intention. In the end, what we attend to, carefully and repeatedly, becomes the shape of our lives. And that is nothing short of love.