Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Our attention is a wildly valuable resource, and some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at scale in increasingly sophisticated ways, leaving us feeling like bystanders to our minds. You might say we’ve built a machine for producing boredom and then entertainment to fill it in an endlessly accelerating and desperate cycle.

Boredom lurks around every corner in our lives. I’ve come to view it, specifically its avoidance, as the silent engine of modern life. Attention, where we put our conscious thoughts in any given moment, is the substance of life. We are painfully aware of the constant claims on our attention — the buzz and zap of the phone and push notifications and texts and little red circles that alert us that there’s more to pay attention to that we haven’t even gotten to yet.

Under this assault, it’s easy to feel that we’re trapped in an age that leaves no space for us to simply sit and think. But it’s worth noting that as much as the current forms of attention capitalism exist to take our attention, there is some very deep part of us that wants it taken…

For many years I have, like an old man, taken a daily constitutional. I began in my early 20s, when I was a freelance writer, which meant working all day either at home or in coffee shops. I found it useful to go for a walk and clear my head. I’d go even on the bitterest days of a Chicago winter, when the wind slices at your face like a blade. I started doing this before the days of the smartphone and even before the days of podcasts on the iPod. During the walk I would just … think. I’d let my mind wander. Almost without exception, my best thinking happened on these walks. I would come back to my laptop, sometimes almost racing up the steps to my apartment, to get the thoughts down.

There are many terms to describe the mental state I so loved during those walks: daydreaming, reverie, mind wandering, lost in thought. And to be clear, there are variations that are less or more pleasant. Obsessively looping through an anxious review of one’s financial situation is the bad kind; thinking through possible destinations for an upcoming trip is the pleasant kind…

Daydreaming is a central experience of being alive and also a casualty of the attention age. Years ago, podcasts came to fill my ears during my walks, conditioning me to feel a little panicked without one. But as I’ve spent more time thinking about attention, I’ve begun to force myself to just walk and let myself be with my thoughts. I’ve also developed a set of routines, habits and hobbies that can provide the framework for a form of modified idleness, just enough to focus on to keep myself rooted and present while allowing my mind to wander. Chopping wood, making handmade pasta, going to the dog park with my canine-obsessed 6-year-old — these are all in the happy but endangered category of things to do that are neither work nor looking at my phone…

 The problem we face is existential and spiritual, not situational. We cannot escape our own mind; it follows us wherever we go. We can’t outrun the treadmill. Our only hope at peace is to force ourselves to step off whenever we can. To learn again to be still.’ (from the New York Times)