Thoughts on attention

September 23, 2025

I have been consumed with the idea of attention since watching this video, Brain Rot and The Fight To Feel Sharp Again by Josephine. There’s a whole video genre of quit your phone and productivity content but this one in particular stands out to me because it has led me down a certain path and also a perspective on social media that is not new by any means, but has a great deal of meaning.

She links to four different articles on Substack, from Adam Aleksic, Kylee, Yana Yuhai, and Erifili Gounari but she focuses much of her video on her thoughts inspired by Florence Scovel Shinn and Simone Weil. Another video became suggested to me, Reading Simone Weil in the Age of TikTok, but as in common with these sorts of videos the point is somewhat buried. What stands out to me is this thread of Simone Weil. Who is she and what did she say and why are people on YouTube talking about her? As happens often, the source of the words Simone Weil wrote can become distant from its original context. Thankfully, this post Simone Weil on Attention and Grace by Maria Popova puts Weil’s two most commonly cited quotes together.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

This quote does not appear in what is Weil’s most well known text on attention, Attention and Will, but rather it comes from a letter to Joë Bousquet, published in Simone Weil: A Life (1976). In Attention and Will, Weil writes:

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

…

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.

In a way none of this is new. In Matthew 6:22, we are told “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light”. Beyond the religious context for attention, many people see participating on social media as a distraction from our attention. Neither can we articulate a clear reason why we dislike being on social media, otherwise it would be easier to quit. Luke Burgis adds in 25 Anti-Mimetic Tactics for Living a Counter-Cultural Life, “[use] Social Media with a Purpose”. Here’s how I would paraphrase his thought:

Without a clear reason for being on social media, your purpose will become what everyone else’s purpose is. You either have to get off it completely or be guided by a very clear purpose. Even then you will have to defend yourself from the mimetic winds.

In other words, social media is not the work, consuming or sharing on it without clear purpose. Neither is reading the news. Attention is a potent force. Curiosity draws us in. But social media creates a false parasocial sense of closeness. I can think of someone in particular who posts a lot of stories on social media so I feel like I know them, but in person our conversations feel rather superficial. I am only on social media to follow bands and musicians. That is my clear purpose.

Back to Attention and Will. You can read it here. Our attention is what defines us. And if we allow our attention to become distracted far away from what truly matters, it leaves us with an unending discomfort.