attention
The most incidental detail
A little dose of time travel
What’s wild about focused attention is that the act of observation is implicitly timeless. A little dose of time travel. To look closely you must be present. And the more present you are, the more you move outside the boundaries of time.
This small internal quaver
Pay attention now:
No matter how much you know or learn about syntax, grammar, or rhetoric,
This small internal quaver, this inner disturbance,
Is the most useful evidence you'll ever get.
Someday, you'll be able to articulate what causes it.
But for now, what's important is to notice it.
Noticing is always the goal....the faint vertigo caused by an ambiguity you can't quite detect.
What matter is what it points to.
Find out what's causing it and fix it
Even if you're not sure how.Attention requires a cunning passivity.
Over and over again
"I found a certain strength in sustaining over a period of time my attention on a single point...Like you paint a painting, and then you paint another painting, but each time you take on a whole other mouthful, and you're only able to chew each one just so finely. So anyway, I did just the opposite."
Which is to say, over the next two years Irwin did nothing but paint the same painting over and over again.
Attention over focus
"When I look at the world now, my posture is not one of focus but rather of attention."
Distraction
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
In a stare
Being in a stare referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involved gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually straight ahead—a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are not really looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it—however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intense concentration. And now I too do this.
Doubling
Obetrolling didn't make me self-conscious. But it did make me much more self-aware. If I was in a room, and had taken an Obetrol or two with a glass of water and they'd taken effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room. In fact, I remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, 'I am in this room.' It's difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it 'doubling', but I'm still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room.
Test anxiety
It was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. Shackleford's observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in 'test anxiety' might well be a fear of the tests' associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread—and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.
This is Water
A Speech by David Foster WallaceThe things that you’re meant to do
A Quote by Josh WardleI used to work in Silicon Valley, and I’m aware of the things that, especially with games, you’re meant to do with people’s attention. You’re trying to capture as much of people’s attention as you can. So that involves things like endless play, or sending them push notifications, or asking them for sign-up information.
And philosophically, I enjoy doing the opposite of all those things, doing all the things that you are not meant to do, which I think has bizarrely had this effect where the game feels really human and just enjoyable. And that really resonates with where we’re at right now in the world and with COVID, and then also we’re trying to figure out, what is tech? What has tech become? I think that really resonates with people, and no ads—well, no monetization. People ask me a lot about these things, and it was like, I was literally just making a game for my partner, and I made some decisions that we would like.
Beauty and compression
An Article by Scott AlexanderThe Buddha discusses states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation:
Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion.
...If you could really concentrate on a metronome, it would be more blissful than a symphony. The jhāna is also a strong contender as a theory of beauty: beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed.
The Student, The Fish, and Agassiz
A Short Story by Samuel H. Scudder & Buster BensonLooking Closely is Everything
An Essay by Craig ModKambara, detail by detail.
I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.
Fragments of time
A Quote by Italo CalvinoLong novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
On Motivation
I’ve had this (semi-vague) idea that I want to write about what keeps us excited to work on Are.na, on the occasion of its 10th (yes 10th) birthday. While writing generally is a tricky process for me, this subject motivation is even trickier.
In turning this subject around in my mind, and thinking about all the people and things that have been influential, I have some idea about what keeps us going.
Nodal points
I started thinking about all the other important “nodal points” (I don’t know what else to call this) of people, places, books, albums, websites, etc. that all played a part in shaping who I am as a person and what I think is important. These points are a combination of seeking things out myself and getting a recommendation that felt like it was actually for me. A mixture of both passive and active knowledge acquisition.
ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,” becoming incrementally more complete. Your perspective (where your gaze is directed) is made up of a meandering line through these points. Learning (or maybe some precursor to learning) is a lot about developing the intuition to recognize when something you find in the world is going to be a nodal point for you.
Infinite varieties of contexts
Over the course of 10 years of using Are.na, I have fully adopted the view that any piece of information can be important to a person given the right context. And on Are.na, pieces of information can be arranged in infinite varieties of contexts – their respective meaning shifts as the proximate information shifts. In other words, the more connections a block has, the more opportunities it has to be a nodal point.
A lifelong project
One question that is still hard to answer after 10 years of working on Are.na is “what is the long term vision?” This is difficult for a few reasons.
One reason is that we have to calibrate our definition of long term with the person who is asking the question. Are.na is a lifelong project. Our ideal outcome as a company is not becoming the next Facebook (god forbid), it’s becoming the next Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot spring hotel in Japan, and one of the world’s oldest businesses (founded in 705 AD).
Growing in the correct way
It often feels like Are.na itself has its own needs and desires—that Are.na has its own personal intuition. And that we (you and I) are figuring out what it wants to be together. We (the organization that works on Are.na) have a very defined sense of how things should be done and why building Are.na is important, but we try not to be overly dogmatic about what exactly it should evolve into.
…We’ve long had the sense that it’s possible to cultivate an experience on the Internet that is more calm, thoughtful, and introspective. And we’ve long had the view that this is possible not from a technology-oriented approach, but from an approach that is more soft, more personal, and more intuitive.
…If we are the blade, what is the shield? I think it’s speed: The dominant model for online platforms (especially social platforms) is speed and scale at all costs. But to us, growing Are.na in the correct way is more important than growing it quickly.