We Are Our Attention
A chapter from Nadia Asparouhova's new book, ANTIMEMETICS.
The following is an excerpt from ANTIMEMETICS: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova, forthcoming later this month, and available for pre-order here.
In the last few decades, there’s been a new wave of what’s called “advanced meditation” that offers access to deep, intense mental states – from the euphoric, to psychedelic, to voluntary loss of consciousness – all of which are achieved solely through sustained concentration.
One type of advanced meditation unlocks a series of altered states referred to as the jhanas. Practitioners experience strong versions of highly positive emotions, ranging from buzzy thrills to a pervasive sense of peaceful “okayness” – much like a “panic attack for joy.” This isn’t your average mindfulness meditation app.
For many people in the West, meditation is synonymous with mindfulness practices that emphasize open awareness. In this approach, meditators are encouraged to stay present with whatever arises – sounds, thoughts, sensations – without focusing too much on any one thing. The goal is to cultivate a sense of calm and nonreactivity, where a person can perceive all things as part of a larger experience without feeling moved to respond.
But this is only one version of what is possible with meditation. Less commonly practiced is a style where, instead of keeping awareness wide and open, a person trains their attention on a specific object – such as the breath, a phrase, or a positive feeling. As the mind zeroes in, remarkable things can happen. Distractions fall away, a sense of self fades, and perception of time dissolves as a person enters a heightened state of effortless concentration.
If you’ve ever been in flow state – lost in a great conversation, toiling on a creative project, deeply absorbed in your workout – you know exactly how this feels. This style of meditation just makes it possible to invoke flow states without the use of external stimuli. Instead of having to strap on your skis and carve the hills to get that sweet feeling of perfect synchronicity with the universe, with enough practice, you can conjure it in your body at any moment.
A highly focused mind, in a state of flow, amplifies whatever it’s given. If you train it on writing code, you’ll code effortlessly for hours. If you train it on an anxious thought, you’ll spiral into a panic attack. And – it turns out – if you train it on joy, you’ll burst into a radiant euphoric state known as the first jhana.
Most casual meditators never encounter these states, simply because this style of practice isn’t as widely known or discussed. Most popular meditation schools in the West, such as Vipassana, don’t teach the jhanas. Some teachers view them as distractions from insight, cautioning against attachment to the pleasurable bodily sensations associated with the jhanas. Many also believe that meditators need years of practice to achieve these deep mental states.
In recent years, a handful of teachers in the West revived the jhanas. New teaching methods made them easier to access in shorter amounts of time: sometimes days or weeks, instead of years. As more people – including Bay Area technologists – discovered the jhanas, they took to Twitter to tell others what they’d experienced.
Intrigued by the chatter on my feed, I pitched a magazine about writing a piece on the topic. As part of my research, I signed up for a retreat myself. I had virtually no meditation experience, save for a Zen retreat I’d attended with a friend over a decade before.
With the guidance of my retreat instructors, I found myself in first jhana – intensely euphoric, comparable to taking MDMA – in less than an hour. Over the next four days, I progressed through nearly all the jhanic states, each with its own distinct and surreal qualities. In fifth jhana, my mind floated out of my body to gaze at an infinite space. In sixth jhana, it exploded with indescribable, psychedelic beauty that – in seventh jhana – dissolved into nothingness.
The jhanas offer a rare glimpse into the extent to which our minds construct the world around us. As someone who had hardly ever meditated before, what surprised me most was not just the actual sensations, but realizing that such extraordinary states had been locked away in my mind this whole time. Their existence demonstrates that attention, when summoned to its full strength, can pull off some incredible and counterintuitive feats.
Attention is how we carve our personal realities: it is the breathing valve of our consciousness. Selective attention, or the act of focusing on one object at the expense of others, determines what we perceive. Like a flashlight, selective attention illuminates whatever it is aimed at, while other, equally “real” objects fade into the shadows. As I type in a café right now, I am able to write because I’m unconsciously filtering out the café’s music, the murmur of other patrons, and the clatter of baristas preparing coffee.
This skill – which some meditators hone to an extreme – are a marvelous bit of wizardry that comes pre-installed in our brains. Using only our minds, we can make the world as beautiful or ugly as we wish.
♦
Selective attention is an essential survival skill, but it also creates blind spots – hidden cognitive biases that dictate what we do or don’t see. The same mechanism that allows us to summon flow states can also filter out ideas that are inconvenient or mentally demanding. These blind spots are a type of antimeme that all of us experience regularly.
Economist Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler – in their essay “Going Critical” – explain how attention shapes conscious experience in their book, The Elephant in the Brain. Our brains gently steer us towards narratives that make us feel good, and away from those that don’t. When someone donates a large sum of money to a charity, for example, they tend to frame it as selfless altruism, rather than acknowledging motives like gaining power or assuaging guilt. These hidden, selfish motives are antimemetic: they remain invisible to the perceiver, because noticing them would present a challenge to how they see themselves.
Hanson and Simler emphasize that this behavior is universal, and having such base desires doesn’t make you a bad person. They even reflect honestly on their reasons for writing their own book, acknowledging motives like a desire for status and prestige. Yet even they – the authors of a book dedicated to uncomfortable truths – admit they were “relieved for the chance to look away” after finishing their book. As they observe, “It’s just really hard to look long and intently at our selfish motives.”
We avoid thoughts that are cognitively expensive to process. But ignoring these ideas doesn’t make them go away. Our antimemetic motives loom large in our minds: the eponymous “elephant in the brain,” silently guiding our choices.
Hanson and Simler use the term self-discretion to describe how our brains suppress highly consequential information. When we encounter an idea that disrupts our current version of reality, our brain “conspires – whispers – to keep such information from becoming too prominent.” We do this not just to protect ourselves, but to avoid passing potentially damaging information onto others, including those we love or want to impress. “Feel the pang of shame? That’s your brain telling you not to dwell on that particular information. Flinch away, hide from it, pretend it’s not there. Punish those neural pathways, so the information stays as discreet as possible.”
The Elephant in the Brain is about one type of antimeme: selfish motives that threaten our self-image and social standing. But this same energy-preserving mechanism filters out any antimemetic idea or task that demands significant mental effort to process. For example, I am reminded of a particularly pesky to-do list item that I put off, week after week, after my son was born: sitting down with my husband to write our will.
This task was an antimemetic albatross – seen and forgotten once a week – that I shuffled dutifully across my calendar. I knew it was important to write a contingency plan in case the worst happened. Though the scenario was unlikely, the consequences of neglecting it could be serious for the people I love. Nonetheless, estate planning is annoying work for two people with busy lives. Every week, I’d see it on my to-do list and bump it to the next week.
No one wants to think about their own death, much less the death of themselves and their partner simultaneously, and the horrible implications it would carry for those left behind. (This seems like a good time to quote Hanson and Simler, who lamented that discussing their book was “a real buzzkill at dinner parties.”) Death, retirement planning, getting married and having kids…for many people, these ideas are difficult to prioritize because they force us to confront uncomfortable truths. Hanson and Simler note how ideas that emphasize altruism or cooperation spread easily: “By working together, we can achieve great things!” These ideas are memetic because they’re inspiring and easy to share. By contrast, ideas that emphasize competition or harsh realities often “suck the energy out of the room” and struggle to spread.
From this perspective, antimemes are an immune response to cognitive overload. Whereas memes only require a small fraction of our attention and are cognitively cheap to engage with, antimemes are highly consequential and are cognitively expensive to grapple with. To protect our attention and avoid disrupting our daily lives, our “unseeing” defense mechanism kicks in, and the object slips by undetected.
Any major change in our circumstances, especially those that tie to psychological and spiritual needs, frequently presents as antimemetic. It is difficult to occupy two opposing realities simultaneously, which can also make it difficult to empathize with prior versions of ourselves – and, by extension, anyone who reminds us of who we once were.
When you’re happy, you forget what it was like to be unhappy. When you’re in a fulfilling relationship, you forget what it was like to be single. When you’re financially comfortable, you forget what it was like not to have money. When you have close friendships, you forget what it was like to be lonely. When you’re healthy, you forget what it was like to be physically impaired.
This type of antimeme poses a challenge for medical professionals who prescribe treatments for ailments that must be followed long after symptoms have subsided – such as antibiotics or physical therapy – or mental illnesses, such as antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, and antipsychotics. When these treatments work well, patients feel good and have difficulty recalling how they felt before – so they stop. One study by The Pew Health Group found that even though most participants knew that the “correct” answer to taking antibiotics was to complete their prescribed course of treatment, nearly everyone in the focus group “admitted they failed to do so, often stopping in mid-course when they began to feel better.”
Handwashing, too, suffers from antimemetic headwinds. Despite a strong public social norm towards handwashing, and clear scientific evidence demonstrating its value, compliance is absurdly low, even in medical settings. According to one meta-analysis, the mean handwashing compliance rate in the intensive care units (ICUs) of high-income countries – in other words, the type of place we’d expect compliance to be highest – is only 64.5%. It’s not that people don’t understand the importance of taking antibiotics or washing their hands; they just can’t seem to stay engaged with these practices. Our health and wellbeing is an all-consuming goal when we don’t have it – but, once obtained, strangely fades from our conscious thoughts.
Attention is a precious, limited resource. We can’t expect to fully engage with every idea that enters our headspace. Yet at the same time, it’s clear that relying too heavily on unconscious filters can leave us blinded to opportunities that would otherwise be useful to “see.”
Given that tradeoffs are inevitable, I find myself wishing for some sort of moral framework with which to evaluate whether I’m investing my attention wisely. Is it equally “good” to focus on human rights activism, versus spending time with my family, versus scrolling on Twitter all day? What is our imperative regarding where to allocate our attention – if there is one at all?
♦
In her short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula Le Guin describes a town called Omelas that stands shining by the sea. The gardens are covered with moss and the roads are lined with trees. Children play in the streets; there is no suffering or conflict. But this idyllic setting conceals a disturbing, antimemetic secret: the residents’ happiness depends upon the imprisonment of one child, who is kept in misery and confinement. Everyone in Omelas knows about the child, and the horrific conditions it must endure, but they do not do anything about it, because doing so would require sacrificing their own happiness.
One way to interpret Le Guin’s story is as a parable about moral complicity. The child in the story represents the oppressed and exploited members of society upon whom our comfort and happiness depends. We are asked to expand our attention to take in all the unseen realities we’ve filtered out of sight, and to consider whether we would continue to live in Omelas with the knowledge of the bargain required, or be one of the few who walk away.
In attempting to apply this lesson to the real world, however, I am overwhelmed by the number of tradeoffs I face in my daily life. How easy it would be if there were only one child from Omelas held captive in the basement of our consciousness, instead of hundreds or thousands! Global poverty, human trafficking, worker conditions in warehouses and factories, factory farming of animals…an entire shadow city of suffering lies behind every basic task in our modern world today. And in the age of supermemes—ideas which spread quickly and are perceived as highly consequential—where we are navigating not just one Really Big Narrative but an entire marketplace of them, we are exposed to even more of these moral dilemmas today, with each one screaming that they are the most urgent and consequential one.
Refusing to engage with difficult ideas – even those that point towards the deep suffering of our fellow humans – does not necessarily make us cruel and callous, or even selfish. No one can expect to fully address, and reconcile, every dilemma they face. When our attention is being pulled in infinite directions, deciding where to direct it isn’t a simple moral question of “good” versus “bad,” but a practical question of how to spend our limited resources. We need to decide which uncomfortable truths to prioritize and which to let go.
We could try to resolve the dilemma of infinite choice by treating it as a problem of utility maximization. This is the view promoted by utilitarianism, which emphasizes acting in ways that maximize happiness and minimize suffering for the greatest number of people. Implied is that there is some discoverable way to rank the relative importance of issues and allocate our attention accordingly, using metrics like "lives saved" or "quality-adjusted life years."
Effective altruism is a philanthropic movement inspired by utilitarianism, and it uses evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to help others. Effective altruists prioritize actions that maximize positive impact, and in some cases, have developed elaborate algorithms to define what “positive impact” actually means.
But such calculations always reflect the values of those who create them. What one person deems most important – whether it’s alleviating global poverty or combating climate change – is shaped by personal, cultural, and historical contexts. Even metrics that seem purely quantitative mask subjective choices about what we value most. Focusing on causes that prioritize improving lives abroad versus those in our local communities, for example – or vice versa – is a matter of personal values.
Le Guin’s story is a testament to the importance of intuition and taste, which prevents us from accepting utilitarianism as a wholesale solution to the problem of prioritization. Omelas is a dark version of the utilitarian world in which happiness is technically maximized for the most number of people (the rest of the town), but comes at great cost (the child). Her story resonates because – for most people, anyway – it just doesn’t feel right to outsource our judgment to a game of numbers.
In his book Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy, philanthropy scholar Peter Frumkin identifies a key consideration for developing philanthropic strategies, which he calls instrumental versus expressive giving. Instrumental giving focuses on measurable outcomes and is driven by a desire to solve specific, often large-scale social problems with efficiency and precision – like the effective altruists’ approach. Expressive giving, by contrast, emphasizes the personal values, beliefs, and identity of the donor. Impact is measured according to individual or community values, even if the outcomes are less deterministic.
Frumkin’s telling of history suggests that we’ve already seen the utilitarian worldview play out. With the passage of time and rise of professional norms in philanthropy – accelerated especially by restrictions imposed by the 1969 Tax Reform Act, such as stricter reporting requirements and mandatory payouts – Frumkin argues that philanthropy went too far in the direction of instrumental giving. An overfocus on efficiency turned into a race to the bottom, where all philanthropic strategies became indistinguishable from one another.
Philanthropy is meant to be pluralistic, reflecting a diverse expression of values from private citizens who exercise the freedom to put their money wherever their ideas are. Instrumentalized philanthropy, on the other hand, starts to mirror the role of government, where there is a single, authoritative way of doing things. Philanthropy and government should ideally work in tandem, where experiments funded with private funds can derisk and inform what’s eventually adopted at the institutional level with public funds. But if philanthropy is too prescriptive, it stifles the experimentation it is supposed to enable.
We can use these two philanthropic dimensions – instrumental versus expressive – to inform how to allocate our attention in a way that benefits our networks. The utilitarian approach feels like monoculture farming. If everyone uses the same calculation to determine where to allocate their attention, we will create a brittle system where too many people do the same type of work, which reduces overall fitness and leaves us vulnerable to blind spots.
Instead of trying to engineer a perfect hierarchy of attention, we should aim to cultivate a “biodiverse” information ecosystem that thrives on a multitude of interests pursued by each of its members. In biology, ecosystems with greater biodiversity are more resilient to shocks and better equipped to adapt to changing conditions. Similarly, a healthy network benefits from having many different nodes pursuing what each finds most meaningful or compelling. Not every gatekeeper will uncover a transformative idea, but the sheer diversity of approaches increases the likelihood that someone will. A decentralized network of curious minds makes the information ecosystem stronger, more adaptive, and more likely to produce ideas that take off.
Each of us, then, is left to decide how we want to prioritize our attention, according to our own values and interests. But how should we balance our personal interests with those of our networks? Is what’s good for us, as individuals, always good for the group?
♦
“Our attention is born free, but is, increasingly, everywhere in chains,” declared a trio of activists in a New York Times op-ed. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt are members of the Friends of Attention collective, a network of “collaborators, colleagues, and actual friends” that formed in 2018 due to shared concerns that our attention is being hijacked for others’ private gain.
Friends of Attention organizes lectures, educational workshops, and performative art to remind the public that there is a war being waged on our attention, and that we need to fight back and reclaim control. They compare the fragmentation of our attention to fracking, or the practice of cracking the Earth’s bedrock to extract oil and natural gas. Profiteers, they claim, are “pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.”
I first encountered attention activism when I read Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing, less than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Odell, an artist and activist based in Oakland, California, frames “doing nothing” as an act of political resistance to what’s often called the attention economy, or the buying and selling of attention in a market, like that between advertisers and media properties.” Advertisers compete for sellers’ attention like casinos bidding for the most degenerate gamblers, tracking consumers’ eyeballs and sentiments and using this information to place just the right ads in just the right places so that they can charge clients as much as possible. Widespread social media use ensures a steady stream of monetizable attention. The producers of attention – that is, all of us – are treated as cattle in these transactions, shuffling around like zombies and staring with glazed eyes at whomever is the highest bidder.
Odell implores us to extricate ourselves from this system, pointing out – as I discovered via on my meditation retreat – that where we direct our focus determines what becomes real. Mastering control of our attention is how we “not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.” Odell is fond of bird-watching, and she recounts how spending her time on the study of birds and local ecology, rather than on her phone, transformed her perception of the world:
More and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them….these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality…. A towhee will never simply be “a bird” to me again, even if I wanted it to be.
I share the activists’ views that taking a hard look at our attention, and how it is being spent, is an important step in helping people reclaim a sense of agency over the world. Researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCollough once showed that when students were asked to keep a daily journal about what they were grateful for, as opposed to recording their grievances, they reported significantly more positive moods – as well as prosocial behavior, such as helping others with personal problems or offering emotional support. People who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives – irrespective of their circumstances – would almost certainly benefit from directing their attention to what brings them joy, which also makes them more likely to make positive contributions to their communities.
Where we direct our attention also shapes more than just our personal realities: it influences which ideas do or don’t spread through our networks. The same critique of utilitarianism – that it leads to idea monocultures – applies to unregulated attention economies. Networks ultimately rely on their nodes to evaluate new ideas. If we let others hijack our ability to engage with difficult or complex ideas, we risk shirking our duties as gatekeepers. Giving away our attention to the loudest, flashiest voices in the room ultimately creates a world where we’re all parroting the same set of banal ideas.
Nevertheless, I find myself somewhat dissatisfied with the solutions offered by the attention activists, who tell us to “remain in place” as a means of reclaiming our attention, but in a way that seems disconnected from our responsibilities to the network. Odell, clearly exasperated by memetic overload, dreams of a world in which we free ourselves from “shouting into the void” on social platforms. Instead, she asks us to “replant [our attention] in the public, physical realm.” “Whether it’s a real room or a group chat on Signal,” she writes, “I want to see a restoration of context, a kind of context collection in the face of context collapse.” Her words reflect a widely felt, contemporary desire to escape the memetic city’s constant churn, seeking safety in smaller communities where we at least know who is vying for our attention, instead of letting it passively trickle out of our brains into the rushing rivers of our news feeds.
In a sense, Odell got what she wanted. Less than a year after How to Do Nothing was published, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and the world ground to a halt. Stay-at-home lockdowns forced us to re-engage with our local, offline worlds, even as it supercharged our online ones. We baked sourdough bread as we scrolled our feeds, but – because we couldn’t see our friends in-person as often, or as easily – we started spending time in smaller online contexts, too. We spun up group chats. We signed up for newsletters. We hosted book clubs and dance parties on Zoom. For a brief period, it seemed that the web had indeed benefited from a “restoration of context.” As a popular meme of the time proclaimed: “Nature is healing.”
But the future that followed didn’t quite look the way Odell envisioned, in which we “reinfus[ed] our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.” The reemergence of the private online web was not a mere reversion to Web 1.0, where people socialized on blogs, email chains, and internet forums, blissfully disconnected from a shared narrative. Instead, the web is now composed of both public and private spaces, and these two worlds are closely intertwined.
Odell imagines that in a space that is “small and concentrated enough…the plurality of its actors is un-collapsed.” But, like a genie wish gone awry, the rise of Signal group chats didn’t necessarily lead to a nuanced landscape of ideas so much as a balkanization: a memetic Galapagos where dense networks lead to even greater and weirder idea speciation, which then make their way back into public contexts, both online and offline. While some group chats are innocuous – the kind that Odell had hoped for – a global restoration of context also made our world darker and stranger and more unrecognizable than before.
When confronted with the noise and unpredictability of the public web, it can feel good to retreat to quieter spaces, whether that’s the private web or our local communities. If our attention is truly ours to spend as we wish, there should be nothing wrong with this behavior. But retreating from the chaos only protects ourselves. It is akin to fleeing to gated communities or the suburbs to avoid the dangers of cities, burying ourselves in the comforts of “local community,” while avoiding the hard work of getting things done at civilizational scale. Taken to its logical conclusion, the divestment of all members from public spaces destroys the integrity of those spaces.
Odell, for her part, recognizes this concern and explicitly cautions against escapism. In a chapter titled “The Impossibility of Retreat,” she warns us from following in the steps of communes in the 1960s or seasteading experiments in the late 2000s, reminding us that “there is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in this world,” even as she acknowledges its temptations.
It is hard to see, however, how one can fully embrace the invitation to “refuse” the world without becoming disengaged from solution building. Odell believes that periodically stepping away is a temporary, not permanent break from reality: a sort of mental reset that reminds us what our lives are really for. But this reminds me of the social media addicts who cycle through deleting and re-installing apps on their phone, instead of learning to cultivate a fluid sense of control in the world they’ve been given.
“Standing apart,” in Odell’s eyes, is “a commitment to live in permanent refusal,” even when actively participating in public spaces. But I find it exhausting to imagine standing in a permanently defiant position, hands on hips, feet apart. How can I learn to act decisively, from a place of ease and confidence, rather than bracing against a constant perceived tension?
Viewed through the eyes of the attention activists, I feel less like an empowered individual and more like a forever-branded piece of cattle that has been rescued from its captors: unchained, yes, but lacking purpose and direction. I don’t just want to stand still; I don’t want to be the naysayer in a sea of people who are doing and building things. There will always be a place for critics and whistleblowers, but if everyone did the same, the world would not be better in the long run. We can’t hunker down indefinitely in cozyweb. Our public narratives and civilizational histories still need to be nurtured. We will always crave the wide, expansive feeling of awe – a supermeme to devote our lives to.
There is no wishing away the existence of the public online web. If we don’t like what we see, we simply have to learn how to engage with it more deeply and meaningfully. We must pick up a paintbrush, find a blank canvas, and paint the world as we wish it to be. Instead of hiding in our safe and quiet communities, we need to summon the courage to step forward and attempt to do great things.
♦
If antimemes are a defense mechanism in response to cognitive overload, we now know how to make things more or less antimemetic: by mastering control of our attention and wielding it to shine a light on whatever we want to make more real in the world. Whether we’re filtering out distractions, grappling with moral dilemmas, or striving to create a better future, our attention is the tool that makes it all possible.
Attention is not something we merely own; it is what we are. Learning to wield it isn’t just about returning to the “present moment,” but rather about creating infinite, dazzling realities.
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