Attention Is Confession

For better or worse

Photo courtesy of Alexander Krivitskiy

I’ve known a number of people who have been cheated on. We all have. Because it’s way too common. And one quirky and often funny thing about these relationships (if you have a sense of humor for stuff like this) is that the cheater is often the one who always wants to look through their partner’s phone.

“Who are you texting?” he’ll ask incessantly while his own phone is full of sexual messages to coworkers. “Why are you on your phone so much?” she’ll insist while she secretly puts Tinder back on her phone. And then eventually the cheated-on finds out and it all makes sense: ah, they were suspicious because of their own guilty conscience. Only a person who is unfaithful could possibly think about unfaithfulness this much. They were projecting.

This is almost like the stereotypical “politician who is vehemently anti-gay caught with a male prostitute” story you see online. Or the grizzled war veteran neighbor from American Beauty, who beats the hell out of his son on the suspicion that he’s gay, turning out to be homosexual himself. These kinds of characters and personas are stereotypical for a reason: they represent how often people’s deepest forms of self-hatred and worry become the lens through which they view the entire world. The hill a man will die on is often the hill where his own secrets are buried.

If someone’s dating profile says “drama free,” you can be sure their life is dramatic and so are all of their relationships.

If someone complains that all relationships are based on power or money, theirs are.

When someone’s entire worldview is “righteously” based on skin color, it doesn’t mean all you see is skin color. It means all they see is skin color. You weren’t thinking about skin color at all, but they keep bringing it up.

If someone says there are no good [men/women] left, it’s because their personality is not attractive to the opposite sex. Of course there are no good women left: there must not be, because he can’t find them — this one lonely guy who has a visible attitude problem.

If you listen to what someone says about the world, you can find out a lot about them. Their value structures, what they look for around them, and what they spend their time thinking about. Everything that comes out of someone’s mouth is a confession of what they pay attention to. Whether that’s good or bad.

So if someone complains a lot, or has a lot of bad things to say about other people, it’s because all of their mental subroutines are based on looking for bad things. All of their search queries against other people are for negative traits. Their mind isn’t looking at people and Googling “what makes this person happy?” and trying to find the answer. Their mind is searching “what are the reasons I can hate and distrust this person?” And they will always come up with answers. Not only because everybody is hateable for their own deliciously unique reasons, but because the human mind will always find justification for something it has decided to believe. Always.

This is how beliefs tend to work. Metaphysical beliefs, religious beliefs, or beliefs about how a stock will perform over the next 3 months. People decide what to believe and Mad Lib the justifications afterwards, paying attention to only what information is helpful to their goal. Most people do not reason themselves into almost anything they believe, really. They believe what makes them feel warm inside, or what is socially convenient.

I’ve told the story before, about a woman I dated one time. (I’m not in the habit of writing badly about other people. But all I can do is tell the stories I have.) She was about as liberal as you can get, temperamentally and in her values and in her preferences. And yet she identified, very loudly, as a Republican. Why? Because her family was nothing but die-hard, conspiracy-theory Republicans. She chose to believe what made her life easier, and filled in the details post hoc. It was a survival mechanism.

Which is understandable, of course. We are social creatures and we almost never choose to willingly “other” ourselves, unless we’re either recklessly selfish or fiercely independent. So we pay attention to what those close to us pay attention to. Even if we know that it’s awful for us or it causes us cognitive dissonance. We attend to bad ideas in service of the tribe.

But if someone’s stated beliefs can clash so violently with the values I can see with my own eyes, it means one very simple thing: I probably should not listen to anything this person says. It’s like when some New York Times writer lambasts the institution of marriage and traditional child raising, and then you ask them what their own life looks like. “Well,” they’ll say, “I’m happily married to a loving man and we’re monogamous and raising our kids together.” And you say… oh.

I’m certainly not against socially convenient beliefs, or against discussing different points of view. What I am against is people who don’t do any of their own thinking — people who give their loyalty and attention away cheaply to bad causes. People who choose tribalism all of the time over basic reasoning and integrity. If you don’t do any of your own thinking, you’re functionally useless as a citizen of a free world; you’re simply a vote to be collected. And you will be collected. Your attention will be captured as one captures a butterfly gently in a net.

But not all people are like that. Some people do have integrity, and their attention and loyalty are to their own beliefs that they’ve actually arrived at through their own work. Or, as opposed to the person who always complains, you’ll meet someone whose mind is always Googling positive things against other people’s personalities. And that person will always find things to love. There are people whose whole day consists of finding the best things about other people and adoring those things. It’s hard to overstate how important these people are. They are confessing their love for the world, and they deserve to be loved in return. We need them. They are the warm grandmothers and the happy housewives and the encouraging Little League coaches.

There is no difference in available information. There is only a difference in attitude. There is a difference in what someone wants to attend to.

I believe it was Nietzsche who said that all philosophy is a form of confession. It’s not education, it’s not a process of reasoning from “first principles,” it’s not a process of describing the functions of the universe. It’s the art of confessing values. It’s simply an exercise in sharing what is important to you and engineering a structure of reasons to make it sound universally correct.

There is no universality. There is only what each person pays attention to. Or each culture, each family, each nation.

If you want a relationship full of love and affection, you had better find someone who is tuned in to that frequency. You can’t hope to share a thing with someone if that person doesn’t even notice that thing. If they notice other things instead.

In the age of limitless information, what you spend your attention on is not only a confession of your character and your priorities, and it is not only an indication of how well you’ve been trained in navigating the digital world. It is also a decision about what you want your life to look like.

If you spend all your time reading bland modern psychology, you will constantly think in terms of mental disorders and self-love practices. Your mental subroutines, your day to day thoughts, will be about the endless (and often selfish) plight of the individual. Everywhere you look, you’ll identify, in yourself and in others, an “opportunity for healing” and ADHD and wounds and trauma and self-centered “needs.”

If you constantly bathe in the hatred of political commentary, you will start assessing every person you meet in terms of their politics and whether they’re your ally or your enemy. There is hardly an uglier person than the person who goes around assessing allies and enemies without even shaking people’s hands or showing them any human affection.

That same woman I mentioned above, her family ostracized me within moments of meeting me. I walked in to meet her parents for the first time, we sat down for a coffee at the table, and within 90 seconds they had asked me whether I took the Covid vaccine. I said yes, for a few reasons I had decided I probably should. Including the fact that my own mother, a Ph.D. and an extremely competent healthcare professional, suggested that I take it.

My girlfriend’s father’s response was “oh, I see you brought home a liberal.”

Now, aside from the fact that this statement was incorrect and he hadn’t even asked me any actual questions, I couldn’t get over how gross this made her family look. What an ugly way to welcome a possible son-in-law into your family — by attacking him. Needless to say, I knew from that moment what kind of family I’d be getting into if I married her. They had just confessed to me everything I needed to know: in this here family, political loyalty is more important than basic human decency. In this family, we are so wrapped up in politics that we have forgotten about everything else.

That’s what can happen if you constantly spend your attention on bad things. Negativity, tribalism, and the vicissitudes of the global moment. It can turn you into pretty much the most unattractive possible version of yourself.

On the other hand, you can spend your attention on smart conversations and lovable people. The internet makes it just as easy to locate stuff that is good for you as stuff that is bad for you. You just have to actively decide that’s what you want to pursue. You certainly can’t trust the algorithm to deliver you something positive.

This is, by the way, one of the ways I think about learning. It’s creating new mental subroutines for filtering the world through. When I listen to a podcast or read an article and I “learn” something, what’s really happening is that I’ve just acquired a new thing to pay attention to in my life; a new way of mediating the onslaught of information. When I learn something from self-help, I've learned a new item to put on my self-inventory checklist which I run through all day every day. When I learn a new thing about history, I have a new thing to bring up as an analogy or metaphor when I encounter something like it in the present. Learning is adding new ways of paying attention.

Better yet, you can spend your attention on books. If you read great stories, old stories, you will see everything in terms of how beautiful a story something is. That’s one of my favorite things about me: I think in terms of great stories.

Everywhere I look, I see people living out beautiful stories. More beautiful or less beautiful. More heroic or less heroic, more loving or less loving. And that's pretty much all I need. Any other kind of thinking, to me, is basically just a distraction.

JR

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.” - Marcus Aurelius