The Attention Seekers
“I faced the destabilizing possibility that I had lost a basic sense of how to live.”
George Porteous is a 20-year-old journalist and writer from New York City studying History at Stanford University, where he is News Managing Editor of The Stanford Daily.
The longer I looked, the more specific the lines of her palm became. I knew almost nothing about her, only that she was a painter of still lifes, about fifty years old, and that she’d come to the attention workshop with her partner, a man wearing flannel who looked to be the same age. I saw that she wore a heavy ring around one finger and wondered if it was a wedding band, though I didn’t ask the question aloud. The facilitators of the workshop had instructed us to observe each other’s hands in silence.
As I did, I thought about the common biological structures of our two hands, cradling one another. We were strangers. Our palms had never touched before, and probably never would again. But as the minutes passed, our veins, fingers, and nails were slowly becoming indistinguishable to me.
I had come to the Strother School of Radical Attention that winter looking not only for human connection, but a retreat from myself. Six months earlier, on the Washington D.C. metro, I realized that I could barely read ten pages of a novel without reaching for my phone. I had instead become tethered to Instagram and Twitter, where I only half-read articles, rarely spending more than ten minutes on a story.
I knew I wasn’t the only one. Many friends had told me they loved to read in childhood but were now unable to lose themselves in a book, drawn instead to the glow of their screens. The fragmentation and acceleration of our attention seemed to be a defining experience of our generation’s transition to young adulthood. It coincided with the revolution of short-form videos and the pre-professional anxiety that pushed college students toward maximum efficiency, relying on ChatGPT to summarize their readings for them.
But the discovery of this broken connection to books seemed to disturb me more than it did some of my friends. I wondered if my unease could be traced back to childhood, having grown up with the unquestioned premise that reading was a basic function of life. My family considered books so vital to the process of becoming oneself that a life without them would be hollow, no real life at all.
My sister and I absorbed this lesson from our mother, who insisted that we learn to read before we entered pre-kindergarten. She sat with us patiently, asking us to sound out letters and words.
Being the youngest in the family, I imagined that literacy would grant me passage across a mysterious divide. On one side were those who could decipher the secret codes that blanketed the world. On the other side were children, entirely dependent on others to navigate street signs, to tell them what they were looking at. I eagerly awaited the day when, having learned to read, I could deposit my own secret knowledge in the adult conversations that bewildered me.
Once I had graduated from sounding out letters and words, I began to live in the pages of books, rereading sentences in an attempt to metabolize their meaning. This obsession with language eventually became my orientation to the world. For a period of several years from the ages of twelve to fifteen, I experienced a phenomenon whose name I only recently learned — hypergraphia, the compulsive need to write things down.
During these years, I kept a paper and pencil with me at all times. If I heard a proper noun I didn’t know, I would catalog it on paper. Hours later, when I was next alone with access to the internet, I systematically searched for each term, trying to reconcile its definition with the earlier conversation. Worried that others would see my behavior as strange, I kept my habit a secret, holding the words in my head for as long as possible, only depositing them on paper when I knew no one was watching.
My hypergraphia eventually came to inhibit ordinary thought. I could no longer enter a conversation without feeling anxious that I would miss something, lose track of an important word. As abruptly as I began writing the words down, I forced myself to stop.
But in the span of a few years, I had taught myself how to keep track of the language around me, to examine people’s faces when they spoke, to listen for mysteries. Books remained my best instructor in paying attention to the world, not only in their content but in the music of sentences, their enlargement of detail through image and grammar.
And so, sitting on the D.C. metro, failing to read Rachel Cusk’s Outline, I faced the destabilizing possibility that I had lost a basic sense of how to live.
As summer turned to fall, my concern with literacy advanced to a deeper anxiety about the inner workings of my brain. Did I still know how to approach the world with clarity and depth? Had I ever known? I thought back to my earliest memories of playing mobile games on an iPod Touch and wondered if the device had finally achieved its logical end point, rewiring my neurons to favor surface and speed.
Underneath my anxiety was a deeper loneliness that stemmed from the panopticon of social media. The internet enabled me to exchange more information with others than at any point in human history, seeming to promise boundless community. Yet I felt this constant flow of information only alienated me. Caught in the glare of mutual surveillance, I was beginning to feel uneasy in the world.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt illuminates a relevant distinction between loneliness and solitude: “Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.”1
Arendt goes on to explain that “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the testing and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.”2
These words shot through me when I first read them. Based on Arendt’s account, the grief I felt for my attention wasn’t just a crisis of ego or intellect. It was a dawning awareness that by reshaping my habits, social media had separated me from an interior self that was capable of dialogue, the self I had found in books. The unrelenting exchange of information with others meant I was never alone. Without solitude, how could I know myself? How could I ever claim authorship over my life?
I began searching for ways to detach from my phone. I turned its vibrant screen to grayscale, deleted social media apps, and promptly re-downloaded them. It was from a tweet that I first learned about the Strother School.
The school describes itself as “a non-profit organization dedicated to ATTENTION ACTIVISM: the movement to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies.” Founded by a group known as the Friends of Attention, which formed in 2018, the School hosts classes, art projects, and free, experiential workshops called “Attention Labs” designed to “reconnect participants to the power of their radical attention.” Under a page titled “Our People,” the school’s website lists humanities scholars, visual artists, actors, and musicians as faculty members and coordinators.3
One of its founders is D. Graham Burnett, an author, historian of science at Princeton, and prominent opponent of what he describes as social media companies’ extraction of human attention.4
The group’s academic firepower was alluring. Now in my second year of college, I had filled my schedule with courses in history, literature, and politics. Despite many of my professors’ generosity, I was beginning to feel some disappointment at the contractual arrangement between instructors and students. Under the pressures of a university system, true mentorship by faculty members felt rarer than I’d hoped for, undermined by the demands of research and student life. The Strother School seemed to pose an exciting alternative, a collective that drew together writers and thinkers outside of existing bureaucracies.
The website went on to cite a man named Matthew Strother as the school’s namesake. A dedicated reader and writer, Strother lived from 1987 to 2023. Even after being diagnosed with cancer, he helped organize the first attention labs, an origin story that lent the school a tragically urgent aura.
I was equally intrigued by the group’s political bent. The website’s opposition to the “Attention Economy” and embrace of “radical attention” carried a left-wing charge, even as it refrained from mentioning capitalism or labor.
Each of these details contributed to my curiosity about the Strother School, creating the impression of an intellectual vanguard as well as a possible remedy for my broken attention. I promised myself that when I came home to New York on a future holiday break, I would attend one of the labs.
Months later, on a frigid day in December, I stood in front of a building in Dumbo where the School owned a loft. Just outside, a line of eager tourists had formed to take photos in an Instagram-famous pose, throwing up peace signs while the Manhattan Bridge hovered conveniently in the background.
A young man in the lobby of the building greeted me with unexpected warmth, holding eye contact more deeply than I was ready for. He directed me to the seventh floor, where I navigated several long hallways to reach “the Sanctuary,” as the School refers to the loft in its introductory email. The room was spacious, airy, and full of light. Tall windows looked onto the East River.
A jarringly familiar pop song played over an unseen speaker — “Snow On The Beach” by Taylor Swift, with Lana Del Rey’s background vocals fading in and out. Twenty-seven chairs at the center of the room faced inward to form a rectangle.
“Welcome,” a young woman intoned from the side of the room. She and another woman introduced themselves as Eve and Raiane, the workshop’s facilitators. They both had dark hair and wore stylish black outfits. I was the first to arrive.
We would begin shortly, Eve and Raiane said, and in the meantime I should set my phone to airplane mode. I tapped the corresponding icon, zipped my phone into a pocket, and hung my puffer jacket on a spare rack. The rules were different here. Whereas the occasional glance at one’s phone was acceptable in most company, I knew it would be taboo at the Strother School.
Waiting for the other participants to arrive, I continued to take in the room. One bookshelf was lined with books of philosophy — Guy Debord, Karl Marx — while black-and-white photographs on the wall depicted people on their phones: a couple lying in bed, turned away from each other, gazing into their screens.
Eve and Raiane directed me to a table where a pitcher of golden apple cider and a stack of cups were waiting for me. I should help myself, they said. It felt rude not to accept this offer, as if I would be rejecting a therapeutic treatment they had lovingly prepared. I poured myself a cup and drank the sweet liquid in a few swallows.
Near the table was a loose pamphlet titled “Twelve Theses on Attention,” authored by “the Friends of Attention,” who described themselves in print as “a coalition of artists and scholars concerned with attentional forms (and practices) that are resistant to commodification.”
Number ten of the twelve theses read: “What is needed is an ethics of attention. This is akin to a practical mysticism. Practical mysticism is not impractical. It is no more and no less than the effort to draw closer to the astonishing reality of things.”
Another stated, “Escape from our attentional nightmare will not unfold in a singular event. The exercise of a truer attention requires the carving out of spaces in the world where it can survive and thrive — new environments.”5
The pamphlet’s invocation of “nightmare” and alternative environments in which to “thrive” called to mind the language of a hippie commune. I thought back to a documentary I had once seen about the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult, whose adherents included plenty of smart, ordinary people seduced by an extreme belief system at a fragile moment in their lives. I wondered half-seriously if today’s attention lab was the gateway to my own radicalization.
The room began to fill. A professional-looking man wearing a button-down and glasses. A muscular, middle-aged woman with arm tattoos and a red beanie. Apart from one teenage girl, I was the youngest person there.
People made small talk about their neighborhoods (mostly Brooklyn) and their reasons for attending. Eavesdropping, I heard two of my new classmates bonding over their waning attention spans. A part of me wanted to join the conversation, though I also felt restrained by our age difference. I stayed in my chair, re-reading the Twelve Theses. By the time Raiane introduced the workshop, at least twenty of us sat looking at each other.
To open the conversation, she asked us to consider what “attention” meant to us. The professional-looking man said that he associated it with work sessions of deep focus and high productivity. This was a mainstream understanding of the word, Raiane assured him, but “time on task” overlooked the true depth and complexity of what human attention could involve.
The workshop would introduce us to “attention activism,” she said, spreading her arms as if to embrace us from across the room. This was a method of resisting the attention economy, puppeteered by the technological and corporate entities who pumped “high-pressure” content into our eyes, creating fissures in our attention, akin to oil fracking. It was easy to see one’s struggle with attention as a personal failing when it was really a systemic problem, she said. Attention activism demanded a move away from “punitiveness.”
I was intrigued by the fracking metaphor. It promised a new vocabulary to name the self-loathing I sometimes felt after wasting time scrolling, retaining little. Was there some hope of reversing my brain’s atrophy if we could simply compare notes, if we could recognize each other?
Still, Raiane didn’t elaborate on what sort of “activism” we would be learning, or what it had to do with detoxing from our phones. It was hard to imagine the people around me staging a demonstration outside of Meta’s headquarters against the company’s algorithms.
The first exercise took inspiration from the photographs on the wall by the artist Eric Pickersgill. Before observing a partner’s palm, we examined our phones, retrieving them from our coats and bags. I held my device in one hand, trying not to see it as a familiar source of information or interaction, but as an assemblage of glass and metal. There was the familiar impulse to open an app, any app. Instead, feeling a little ridiculous, I traced the cracks on its black mirror surface, fingerprint smudges, and the dust collecting under the phone’s transparent plastic shell.
Like twin yoga instructors, Eve and Raiane played a chime, piercing the silence they had instructed us to observe. This was our cue to begin examining our hands. Another chime, and we held hands with a partner.
When we came together in small groups to discuss our experiences, the still life painter said she’d been lost in thought about why Silicon Valley engineers had settled on a reflective material for the iPhone screen. It created surface and depth at the same time, she said, and did we know that a growing number of Chinese schoolchildren were nearsighted because they studied using technology at such high rates?6
The older woman with tattoos and a beanie, a charismatic artist named Michelle, told the group that she had no phone to examine. She had recently “taken a hammer” to its layers of electronics. I laughed along with the room, beginning to feel some camaraderie with these strangers who seemed to share my fantasy of a world without phones.
The next exercise took inspiration from the third thesis on attention: “Retracing the attentional path of a free mind is one of the keenest pleasures we can take in each other and in the world.” Eve divided us into pairs and instructed us to hold a conversation in which one participant exclusively asked questions, while the other talked only about themself. After some time, we would switch, she said. The guiding topic of conversation should be mundane. Did anyone have ideas? Soup, someone suggested. Yes, soup was perfectly mundane.
John, the bearded Brooklynite in his late twenties with whom I was paired, began with a memory of his grandfather’s love for borscht. A previous generation of his family had been Russian Jewish immigrants to New York, he said. Some of his relatives still lived in Brighton Beach.
He was endearingly committed to the exercise and I felt myself wanting to reciprocate his enthusiasm. I watched his face intently, listening as I once did for proper nouns. We progressed from his family to his college years in the Midwest before arriving at his girlfriend, with whom he shared a Park Slope apartment and participated in a local food co-op.
When it was my turn to speak, I began with my grandmother in Minnesota, who always made a bowl of french onion soup for me when my family visited because she knew it was my favorite.
John’s questions revealed the parts of my answers that required clarification, the words and phrases I took for granted as common speech but which really belonged to a different childhood, a different generation. He wanted to hear about my relationship with my parents, my experience in college, even my dating life. I had a feeling of exposure at these questions and thought back to Heaven’s Gate.
Still, I couldn’t deny there was something liberating about my disclosures to John, mostly because he was a stranger and had no real bearing on my life. The validation I gained from his interested expression carried more weight because our conversation was, for him, a fresh encounter with the facts of my life. ‘Soup’ led the other pairs down a similar road of intimacy. One group said they had discussed caretaking and what it meant to live as an artist, all of which sounded very adult.
The young man from the lobby joined us for a closing conversation. Looking at each member of the group, he introduced himself as Peter, the Strother School’s program director. Spending time in community with others could allow for a more enriching form of attention, he said. It offered relief from the undue expectations of perfection we placed on ourselves. This was why the School created opportunities for organizing around “shared questions,” including philosophy lessons and free “sidewalk studies” in which participants roamed the city, examining the concrete beneath them.
It was time for our final exercise. Eve said it took inspiration from Henry James’s metaphor of attention in The Wings of the Dove as a “great empty cup” on the table between an ill patient and her doctor. She was asking us to see attention as fundamentally relational, a form of care between people.
Going around the rectangle, we would each share an instance of rich attention in our lives, as if to fill the cup. The moment just before plucking a guitar string, a young man said quietly. The inhalation of steam over a bowl of hot broth. The face of an old friend, just before she speaks in the first moment of a long-awaited conversation.
Reburied in my puffer jacket, I stepped out of the building and into the cold air. The painter and her partner were leaving, too, their arms wrapped tightly around each other in the cold. Her heavy ring rested above the man’s waist, still gleaming on one finger. We said our goodbyes on the sidewalk.
Wandering Dumbo, a new warmth was budding in my chest. I began to daydream about the seminars Peter mentioned. In my mind, I was already sharing a long wooden table with brilliant scholars, probing the depths of attention. On Brooklyn sidewalks, I would find relief from my loneliness, rebuilding my attention to the world among a new community. Together, we’d look for an escape from the tech-addled experience of modern life.
My musings carried me past a carousel crowded with families where children tugged on their distracted parents’ sleeves. The winter sky was howling over Manhattan. At the edge of the East River, I looked down to see dark water crashing against the jagged stones below, foam rising upward. In the afterglow of the workshop, I experienced these phenomena without categories, as if encountering them for the first time. The strangeness of the world was only beginning to unfold.
These effects were more fleeting than I’d hoped. Today, I still haven’t returned to the Strother School. Every time I revisit the website, hovering my cursor over the sign-up button for a sidewalk study, I find myself replaying that day in December. The ding of a chime, “Snow On the Beach,” a stranger holding my hand — I had played along with these activities for a day, but now I couldn’t imagine trying them again.
Beneath the facilitators’ soothing instructions, I now heard a vaguely religious tone that struck a discordant note with me. The abrupt kinship I felt with my fellow participants had been intoxicating. But like a hangover that follows drunken insight, my communal feelings now seemed artificial. I imagined that membership in the Strother world would require submission to New Age groupthink. It didn’t seem much better than the conformism of social media.
Months after the workshop, back on Instagram, a new post from the Strother School crossed my feed. It was a photo of John, the bearded man I spoke with, at another event. The attention lab must have inspired him enough to return. Seeing the photo, I thought seriously about our age difference for the first time.
At twenty years old, living on a college campus, I had no shortage of people to meet. But if you were moving to New York City as a millenial, entering a world that was indifferent to your intellectual growth, accepting a set of group norms was probably necessary to find a community.
In this light, I recognized everything that turned me off about the workshop as a generational code which necessarily excluded me. Of course I had been repelled by its therapeutic style and deep earnestness. These were the trademark style of so-called “millennial cringe,” and I was no millennial.7
If the Strother School was built for 35-year-olds in Park Slope, I began to wonder what a Gen Z equivalent might look like. What was our generational code?
As we graduate into an unusually painful job and housing market, perhaps it’s no surprise that young people are more pessimistic about the future.8 A corresponding irony saturates our online humor. Our exposure to mobile phones from an early age and their total integration into our social life makes breaking away from technology to “reclaim” our attention seem futile or even nonsensical to many. Still, I am convinced that the kind of solitude which flows from deep attention is worth defending, precisely because it restores the thinking self that Arendt theorized.
In an essay this February, literary critic and former Yale professor William Deresiewicz remembered Matthew Strother, his former student. “The mistake people make when they talk about reading today (I have made it) is to accept that it is just one thing,” Deresiewicz wrote. “The screen, our fractured attention spans, et cetera ad infinitum. But it is not one thing and never was and needn’t be…Nothing is ‘inevitable,’ as the tech lords would have us believe. No one is making you do this.”9
The Strother School would never be my community, but my time there still marked a turn toward the possibility Deresiewicz described. Even signing up for the lab proved that I still had authorship over my life. In time, I set hard limits on my social media use, enrolled in reading-intensive classes, and frequently set my phone to “Do Not Disturb.” Returning to books, I found solitude.
The expansion of a similar autonomy among young people will require turning individual acts of attentional recovery into a generational mandate. A school of our own — what could be more radical?
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 477
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 478
The Ezra Klein Show: “Your Mind is Being Fracked”
Friends of Attention, Twelve Theses on Attention
The Economist, “China’s revealing struggle with childhood myopia”
Rebecca Jennings, Vox, “Toward a unified theory of ‘millenial cringe’”
Jessica Grose, The New York Times, “No Home, No Retirement, No Kids: How Gen Z-ers See Their Future”
William Deresiewicz, Here Come the Allodidacts
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Amazing, amazing, amazing!!!
Isn’t reading books a distraction from “solitude” in the same way as scrolling through your phone? Shouldn’t one be deep in your own thoughts to truly achieve “solitude”?