Attention is to humans what water is to fish

The first chapter of the final booklet called "Attention for Attention"

You look at your phone. Again. For the how-many-th time today? You can't remember. What were you looking for again? A notification perhaps, a message, something interesting. Maybe that is how you ended up on this article. But honestly, you can't even remember. Your thumb scroll mechanically further, past posts you barely register, through a timeline that has no beginning or end.

Then your name is called. Your partner, your child, your colleague. You look up. “Sorry, what did you say?”

This simple, everyday moment reveals something fundamental about how we live. Your attention was there, right under your nose, in your hands, captured in a glowing screen. And at the same time, you weren't there at all. You were absent from your own life.

Where was your attention? And more importantly: who or what determined where it went?

The largest extraction industry in the world

An industry has emerged that is larger than the oil industry, more influential than the pharmaceutical sector, and more interwoven with our daily lives than any other economic force. It is the attention economy, and you are not the customer, you are the product. Or more precisely: your attention is the product. That is sold to advertisers.

Scott Galloway, marketing professor at New York University, puts it sharply:

“We have linked profitability to separating people from the most valuable thing in their lives, namely (attentive) relationships.”

Think about that for a moment. Companies make billions by luring you away from the people and things that really matter. They have built systems (algorithms, notifications, infinite feeds) specifically designed to hold your attention. They do this to squeeze your mind as much as possible, so that you look as much as possible at advertisements that generate their profit.

But here is the paradox: we can barely face the problem due to all the distractions.

What actually is attention?

Ask yourself this simple question: what is attention to me?

Maybe you'll think of an interesting definition that you won't even find in this book. Because attention has so many different facets, it makes the question “what is attention?” very interesting. Everyone has their own definition that highlights a certain angle.

Attention is difficult to define because it is so omnipresent. It is the lens through which we experience everything, but we can hardly see the lens itself. Yet we can start with a simple truth:

Attention is the capacity to turn our intentions into reality.

Do you want to write a book? Then you need thousands of hours of attention. Do you want to be a good parent? Then that requires daily attention for your child. Do you want to learn a skill, build a relationship, achieve a goal? All impossible without attention.

But attention is more than a tool for productivity. As we will see, it is also fundamentally connected to care, to love, and to our ability to be fully human.

Attention is of vital importance

From the first second we are born until the day we die, we are dependent on attention. A newborn baby cannot survive without the attention of caregivers. And babies know this intuitively. They cry, laugh, babble, make eye contact. All behaviors that have a magnetic effect on attention.

Anyone who has spent time with a baby knows their almost magical ability to captivate a room full of adults. A smile, a little cry, a first step and suddenly all attention is focused on that little creature. And this is no coincidence, it is evolution. If 300,000 years of evolution optimize for attention, then you know it is important. After all, babies who are better at drawing attention have a higher chance of survival.

Here we discover a new definition of attention:

Attention is a form of care.

When a parent gives attention to a crying baby, that is literally a form of care. Feeding, warmth, reassurance, play; everything begins with attention. Without that attention, the child would not survive.

As we grow out of the baby phase and become children, the social dimension of attention becomes increasingly important. At school, in friendships, later in romantic relationships, everywhere we discover that attention is a reciprocal phenomenon. It is always an exchange.

Think back to your school days. Who were your friends? Probably the children who really listened to you, who saw you, who acknowledged what you said. And who was left out? Often the children who couldn't listen well, who only talked about themselves, who couldn't hold or return the attention of others.

We learn a crucial lesson at a young age: the balance of giving and receiving attention determines the quality of our relationships. He who listens well, who is attentive, who acknowledges the other, easily builds connections. He who does not, remains isolated and often receives little attention in return.

Attention is perhaps the very first currency that we exchanged as humanity. Before we had coins, before we even had language as we know it now, we were already exchanging attention. For example, through a look or a gesture, or a moment of shared attention for the same thing, these were and still are the building blocks of human culture.

Where attention goes, connection grows

Mind-researcher and psychiatrist Daniel Siegel summarizes the neurological basis of attention in one elegant sentence:

“Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and connection grows.”

This principle, better known as neuroplasticity, means that our brain literally reshapes itself based on where we direct our attention. Direct your attention daily to fear and worries? Then you strengthen the neural pathways associated with fear. Direct your attention to gratitude and connection? Then that network grows.

You can compare this to walking through a thick layer of freshly fallen snow. The first time you walk through the snow, it is hard work. But if you walk the same route every day, a path automatically forms. Eventually, you can walk it almost with your eyes closed. That is how your brain works too. Interesting side-note: psychedelics in therapeutic settings appear to act as a kind of fresh snowfall that gives you the chance to form new pathways again. But that aside, because this brings us to two fundamental modes in which our mind can function:

Conscious attention: If you learn a new skill, for example juggling, speaking a new language, or standing on your hands, you must be there with your full attention. Every action requires supreme concentration. This costs a lot of energy, but it then also builds new neural pathways.

Unconscious automation: After much repetition, behaviors can become automatic. Cycling, driving, typing on a keyboard, things that first seemed impossible to you, now happen without you having to think about them.

Automation is incredibly useful. Imagine if you had to relearn how to brush your teeth, how tying your shoes works, how to make a cup of coffee every morning. It would be endlessly exhausting. Automation makes complex behavior effortless.

But the sword cuts both ways.

Those same mechanisms that make healthy habits possible, such as brushing your teeth, exercising, and being kind, also make destructive patterns possible. Smoking, excessive scrolling on your phone, emotional eating, procrastination. This too becomes automatic if you repeat it often enough

What has changed

Our species has existed for about 300,000 years. For most of that time, our environment changed slowly. Very slowly. The skills your grandparents needed were largely the same as those you needed. So there was time to learn, to adapt, to pass on wisdom from generation to generation.

But over the last twenty years, something unprecedented has happened. The digital revolution has transformed our world at a speed that is evolutionarily incomprehensible. Smartphones in everyone's pocket have been around for less than fifteen years, and they have already fundamentally changed how we communicate, work, entertain ourselves, even think, but above all; how we direct our attention.

Our attention, this precious, scarce resource with which we must do everything else in life, has become the main battlefield of the largest companies in the world. Just look at the top 10 most valuable companies, where you will find Apple, Meta, and Google, among others. There are thus hundreds of thousands of engineers, psychologists, and data analysts working full-time to manipulate and hold your attention. They know more about how your brain works than you do. And they use that knowledge not to help you, but to sell you as a product.

The price we pay for that is high. Higher than we usually realize.

The price of absence

The long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked the entire life course of people since 1938, across multiple generations. After decades of collecting data on health, well-being, and longevity, the researchers discovered something remarkable about what gives people a long and happy life.

Smoking turned out to be less important than expected. Exercising too. Even your diet and genetics played a smaller role than thought.

The quality of your relationships turned out to be by far the strongest predictor.

And what makes a relationship of good quality? At its core: a balanced exchange of attention. People who feel seen, heard, important. People who know that someone is truly present when they speak.

Think of the last time you had a really good conversation with someone. A moment when you felt: this person is truly here. They are not listening with one ear while glancing at their phone. They are fully present.

How did that feel? And how often does that still happen?

We live in a time when we are more 'connected' than ever. We have hundreds of contacts on social media and DM with anyone in the world. At the same time, people report record levels of loneliness and depression. This contradiction is no coincidence. Connection without attention, without a body, without all your senses, is not a real connection.

Every time you look at your phone while your child is talking to you, every time you are already formulating your answer during a conversation instead of truly listening, every time you are somewhere else with your thoughts while your body is present: you are building a life of absence.

And the strange thing is: we often don't even notice it. Just like the young fish in the story of David Foster Wallace.

Learning to see what was always visible

The American author David Foster Wallace opened his famous commencement speech with a simple story:

“There are two young fish swimming along. They meet an older fish swimming the other way. He nods at them and says, 'Good morning, boys. How's the water?' The two young fish swim on for a bit, and eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'”

This is our dilemma. Attention is the water in which we swim. It is the thing with which we do everything else and therefore we are almost blind to it. Just as we cannot hear our ears, taste our tongue, smell our nose, so it is also an immense challenge to pay close attention to the movement of attention itself.

But (and this is crucial) it is not impossible.

The artist James Turrell, famous for his work with light and perception, says something that captures this beautifully:

“Seeing yourself see is almost sensual; there is a sweet deliciousness in consciously experiencing your own perception.”

Turrell speaks about a way of looking that goes beyond just seeing. It is the conscious experiencing of experiencing itself. You can compare this to eating: you can mindlessly wolf down a sandwich while looking at your phone, or you can consciously taste it. Then you feel the texture, distinguish the flavors, appreciate the entire sensory process.

With attention, it is the same. You can go through life like a sleepwalker, fed from one automatic reaction to the next. Or you can begin to notice: hey, there goes my attention. And here. And now there again.

As soon as you begin to notice the movement of your own attention, something remarkable happens. Space is created. Where you used to react automatically, you can now choose. You can now direct your attention.

It is as if you stick your head above water and see the entire ocean for the first time instead of being pushed back and forth by the invisible currents.

Beyond words

Everything I have described so far (the social dimension of attention, the neurological basis, the urgency in our digital age) is relatively easy to explain and understand. It can be described conceptually in words and researched.

But there is another dimension of attention. A dimension that is much harder to define, which you cannot understand by reading about it, but which you must experience to know.

I discovered this dimension during my first ten-day Vipassana meditation course in the meditation center 'De Glind', tucked away in the heart of the Netherlands. Ten days of silence. No phone, no books, no eye contact with other participants. Only sitting and giving attention to the most subtle sensations of the body.

The first few days were torture. My body ached, my knees, my jaw, my mind raced, and I wondered what the purpose of this was. But around day five, something began to shift. It happened subtly, without fireworks, like a quiet change that you barely notice but can feel. My attention became still and quiet.

I suddenly began to notice very consciously how my attention moved. It was no longer a concept, but a living reality. I could feel how my mind jumped from thought to thought, like a monkey swinging from branch to branch. I could perceive the texture of attention itself: its quality, intensity, focus, shape.

And then I discovered something even stranger: between the thoughts, between the movements of attention, there was space. An eternal silence. A kind of clear awareness that was simply there, in the background, without content, without form.

This is the piece of the puzzle that sparked my endless curiosity for attention. Because in that experience, beyond all theory, beyond all concepts, lies something that is fundamental to human existence but which our culture seems to have largely forgotten.

In the coming chapters, we will dig deeper. We will explore how attention works at a neurological level, how the attention economy arose and how it manipulates us. And perhaps most importantly: how we can defend our attention in a world that is out to steal it.

But first, we must see the water in which we swim.

That is what this book is about: seeing what was hidden in plain sight.