The Battle for a Most Valuable Resource.

Technology, attention, and a case for mindfulness

A s with any new pursuit, it’s helpful to first have some perspective of what one can expect to experience or gain from a seemingly trivial practice. It’s important to understand, however, the potential value of triviality.

Indeed for much of modern society, scheduling time to intentionally do nothing can be — forgivably so — viewed as a laughable waste of time. Especially considering the time required from jobs, relationships, families.

In addition to the time and attention required from our daily responsibilities, we — as a society — must contend with the deluge of information infiltrating our daily lives. Prior to the computer/internet revolutions information was something that wasn’t as readily available and required . Only to reverse in recent decades, requiring effort to and thought to simply ignore the information.

This facet of modern society is historically a new phenomenon to manifest itself, and important to consider while on the path to mindfulness. Only to be exacerbated in recent decades with the extreme advances in socialized technology sweeping societies across the globe. Never before have Americans been so connected, yet so alone. Describing contemporary Westerners as a people that are as Sherry Turkle puts it, “alone-together.” Never before have humans had to ingest so much information.

If the aim of technology is to bring efficiency and ease to daily life however, how can it be having the opposite effect?

I believe a main contributing factor be the battle over human attention and the emergence of the “attention economy”. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues, “the true scarce commodity [in the near future] will be human attention,” and Silicon Valley’s battle for attention is already drawing its first casualties.

Pay Attention

Twelve, eight and nine. These first two numbers represent the attention spans (in seconds) of an American adult from 2000 and 2016 consecutively. The third is the attention span of a goldfish.

As the New York Times covered in 2016, there is ample evidence illustrating the negative psychological impacts overuse of technology (smart phones, personal computers) can have. Giving rise to a pervasive condition known to health communities as ‘Information Fatigue Syndrome’, resembling symptoms associated with chronic fatigue.

Indeed, companies such as Google and Facebook — to name a few — design their products using addictive psychology as a rubric. Malevolent as these tactics may seem, organizations are pushed in this direction by the sheer weight of demand for more. The so-called “attention economy” has — for millions — become a double-edged sword.

To be sure, much of technology’s advance will bring value to humanity, but we must also learn how to not be swept up with it. It’s for this reason meditation and mindfulness have become increasingly relevant.

Speaking from personal experience, and with plenty of resources to provide, I’d like to invite you to challenge yourself to intentionally do nothing. In the following publications I will introduce some of the science as well as some additional information to help you realize the true value of your time.