Too Darn Much

Human attention, loneliness & other things I worry about frequently

Photo by Gavin Allanwood.

I feel a bit like I’m being screamed at nearly all the time.

One example: some time within the past year, the pumps at the gas station I frequent¹ started playing videos ads only whilst pumping is occurring. What the ads are for, I don’t know because I don’t pay attention to them.

I refuse to listen because honestly I’m peeved. I’m peeved that “they” are trying to sell me something as I am literally buying something. I’m peeved by the noise, the music, and the faux-chipper voices. I am also annoyed because there’s an ad playing when their previous hadn’t been one. There’s an ad encroaching on a moment which otherwise would have been—not ad-free necessarily—but at least optionally spent. I could have chosen to stare off into space in silence, or at least just with classic rock playing over the loudspeaker. Whatever part of my brain is pricked by the presence of content meant to sell me something would have otherwise been left alone.

It’s of course not the only ad or attention grabber I’ll encounter while running errands. When I go out, I really ought to count the ads I see from the time I leave my house until I return again. The billboards, the signs at the store, the videos, etc. That’s to say nothing of the emails I’ll receive in that time, and the calls to buy something I might get if I check my phone.

Or maybe I shouldn’t count. It’s likely upwards of several thousand.²

And it’s getting to be too much, don’t you think? The video ad at the gas station feels like the last straw to me but they’ll probably come up with something else next week.

I’ve heard the term “attention economy” a good bit over the past few years and I felt like I knew what it meant but I’d never looked up the definition. My husband technically works with the attention economy, so I feel like I have a bit of an inside view. Frustrated by the slew of ads I see every day and the cacophony they cause, this felt like the appropriate time to understand the concept better.

So I finally looked into it further. Apparently, the attention economy is: an approach to the management of information that views human attention as a scarce commodity.

Human attention as a scarce commodity.

Do you find that terrifying? I find it terrifying. I got a chill down my spin when I read it. That’s the definition? Our attention is a commodity, a resource? And we admit it is scarce, precious?

Ok, but what is human attention?

As I was writing this I was reminded of a quote that is apparently from Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher. I know nothing about Stoicism, despite my husband and Abigail Thorn’s³ best efforts, and the quote is maybe taken out of context, but it seems sound to me. I also appreciate that it’s entered public discourse enough that it’s one of those often unattributed quotes. (Sorry, Epictetus, whoever you are.) It goes:

“You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will.”

Why wouldn’t you be what you give your attention to? That is was absorbs your time. It’s what you give your life to. As far as I can, you are your attention.

So if we are giving however many minutes and hours of time it takes to see thousands of ads daily and all the social media posts and all the emails and everything else, what are we? What are we doing? Viewing things, having information foisted upon us, we aren’t creating or contributing. We’re consuming. We’re consumers.

Personally, I want more for myself. I want more for all of us.

Because if we become what we give our attention to, then aren’t we the commodity?

It’s of course not just the ads at the gas pump that are too much. The attention economy has seemed to change the online landscape incredibly in a short amount of time. It’s also all the emails and social media, which are now tools of the attention economy.

Wanting some more insight, I remembered Jenny Odell’s work. Her first book is called How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I started reading it back in the dark days of late 2020, but could not manage much past the second or third chapter. Sometimes a book is just not right for where you are in life.⁴

So instead this past week I listened to Odell’s For the Wild episode. It’s a good conversation and I recommend listening to in full.

I also recommend the piece

Lindsey Melden

wrote on How to Do Nothing. She actually read the book and, as usual, shares wonderful insights on

BiblioArcana

. You can read her essay here. If you also have read Odell’s book in full, I would love to know your thoughts.

But all I know for now is what’s in the For the Wild interview. So that’s the limits of my knowledge, and I greatly appreciated what I heard. Odell and host Ayana Young talk about our attention as currency, the landscape of social platforms, loss of privacy, loss of complexity, tending to the ecological self, and “refusal in place.”

Young quotes part of How to Do Nothing, and I looked for a fuller version of the quote because I think it’s a good one:

“On a collective level, the stakes are higher. We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process. In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other.

Odell talks about the ways in which on social media we offer up so much info about ourselves, knowingly and unknowingly. And how we get stuck in the loop of the attention economy.

“..one point I was trying to make in the book was that the attention economy trades on not just attention, but a really specific form of attention, I think, a shallow one. So kind of reactive knee jerk reaction, the way the kind of attention that an advertisement would work on, almost like habitual. And a lot of what I'm trying to do in the book is to talk about and try to encourage or grow this, these other deeper, slower forms of attention. And it's like this shallow attention both feeds the attention economy, but it also comes out of it. So it's the thing that kind of like draws you into it. But it's also the thing that it teaches you and so there's this danger of entering this spiral where your attention is only ever very shallow. And your attention span is very short. And the amount of attention that you pay to things is very small.”

I think I could potentially write paragraphs and paragraphs, with lots of citations, about how this spiral is harmful to us, to the ones we love, including the more-than-human world. How only having shallow attention and shorter attention spans is no way to live.

But I don’t think you need me to do that. I think we know all that. We can feel it, and we are tangibly aware of this reality daily.

And honestly, I’m tired. It’s just after 3pm. My brain has already mustered up a thousand, shallow reactions to a thousand things that did not deserve those seconds of my life.

So how to opt out then?

I honestly have no idea. I did the thing that is perceived as the ultimate opt out and the grass is not as greener as I thought. I don’t feel wildly liberated or at peace, at least I don’t right now. It turns out opting out can also be incredibly lonely.

I left social media late 2021. Not just for a little while. I got rid of everything.

I deleted my Facebook and Instagram—my social medias of choice. All I have left are Pinterest (if that counts) and Substack. This move felt really pressing for my mental health, even though I had a small business that I was promoting on Instagram at the time. I also felt really weird about trying to sell people stuff and making content that would potentially keep people on the app for longer. I didn’t want people on the app for longer, particularly not if I was doing it for my own financial gain.

So by the new moon in November 2021 I ditched all of it.

And it is quieter now. I’m grateful I left. It gave me mental space and a different view of things I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But I will also be honest: it’s very quiet now. It has affected my relationships with people in tangible ways.

I realize now how much “connecting” I was doing via Instagram, both with people I had met in the real world and people I hadn’t. Very suddenly, that disappeared. For a while I was just confused. “Why do I suddenly feel so alone?” I’d wonder. And then I realized it was likely because I’d been interacting with folks mainly on social media. Even though I’d warned friends I was leaving the platforms, I didn’t start to hear from them more (or hear back) via other methods. My daily connections with people—shallow or not—dropped off.

It seems as though I am no longer participating in the spaces where people’s attention is. And so I am, understandably, a bit forgotten about. People only have so much attention—it’s a scarce commodity after all—and now my posts don’t slip in whilst they scroll. I’m not visible and the ways that they share about themselves are no longer visible to me either. I can’t see the Facebook group chats, so I don’t know when the get togethers are. I don’t know about the local events. People aren’t getting a little peak into my world that they can give a little reaction to. I can’t share TikToks, or even easily see them. People sometimes share some heavy stuff, or joyful news, on social media and I have no idea.

Even still, I don’t think I’ll go back to social media. It takes too much of my time and it messes with my head. Giving up that much information about myself and time of my life also doesn’t feel right.

As Jenny Odell says in her interview with Ayana Young,

“I think that one of the things that happens when you step back [from using social media] is these things that started to seem sort of so second nature, they're hard to see, they will come back into focus. And I think you may start to ask questions, like, you know, ‘Why am I offering all of this information? Why am I spending so much time in this space, in which I am generating so much data that is so lucrative to these companies?’ Not to mention, offering up parts of myself to question marks right? Like, complete strangers. Versus maybe just sending things to your friend, who is actually the person who you wanted to see that thing.”

What I’ve long wondered is what is a solution? Because I don’t think everyone is just going to opt out and hit delete on their account. I’m not even sure if that’s truly been a completely positive solution for me. I can send the things I want to share directly to my friend, but I am a singular message competing with how many emails? How many notifications? When I don’t hear anything back, I have a pretty good guess why.

It’s too much.

What’s a solution for the way social media has developed, which includes fracking the scarce and sacred currency of our attention? Would it be enough to go back to the early days of Instagram, when it was truly instant and there were no ads? Dare I say, I miss those days. Even the early days of Tumblr seem quiet and quaint now. Will we only have peace once all the social medias go away? Or do we need to get to the bottom of it and take the attention economy out by the ugly, gnarled taproot?

So is there a way it can be done that benefits us all?

Is there a way to do social media like the way the state of Maine does roadside info? Maine doesn’t have billboards. Billboards to me feel very shouty, so I enjoy this. There is still info along the road to tell you where things are, often in muted green or blue, small, non-flashy roadside signs. Sometimes they’re hand painted. Quilts, that way. Campground, this way. Lobster pound, 2.5 miles down the peninsula. But you can drive for hours down I-295 and never see a billboard. Route 1, Atlantic Highway, same way. It’s quiet pine tree after pine tree after pine tree, with a couple small signs.⁵

Can we quiet it all down, is what I’m asking, so that we have the space, depth, and breath for our attentions to flourish?

Odell, at the end of her book and the end of the interview, talks about bioregionalism as an alternative. I perked up when I heard this. Having dabbled in herbalism studies for a bit, bioregionalism is a term that makes sense to me. It’s the “advocacy of the belief that human activity should be largely restricted to distinct ecological and geographical regions.”

Would bioregionalism also meaning getting off social media and connecting with people face to face in our area? Or connecting geographically first, and then keeping our online connects focused on the people and places where we live?

Or, as Odells says: “I think, if you pay a lot of attention to your bioregion, or anything in your bioregion, it forces you to acknowledge complexity and reciprocal relationships. And it also kind of troubles the idea of like a bounded entity.”

Odell describes bioregionalism with an example. She’s an avid birdwatcher, and as she’s watched the birds in her area, she’s realized that her attention is slowly spreading to other things around her that are connected to the birds she’s come to care about. Trees, insects, seasons, micro seasons. She’s grounded in love and care with a thing she can relate to, slowly, in real life and from there her attention spreads.“And it’s just kind of like any point you pick in a bioregion,” she says, “is going to branch outward like that. And so I think it's a really helpful model for relearning how to see and appreciate complexity and interdependent relationships.”

How does this translate to a social media platform or ads? Perhaps there’s more to be learned from Odell’s book. So maybe I’ll get my hands on a copy again. Because something like this seems like a thing I could get behind:

“Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.”

I don’t know what else to say except: may it be so.

Phew. Someday I will write an essay that feels easy to write, but today is not that day.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Is there something that is too darn much for you? What is it?

How’s social media going for you? You still on there? What’s it like?

Have you read Odell’s book? What did you think?

1. Thanks to shopping points at the grocery store.

2. https://web.archive.org/web/20200320191358/https:/www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html

3. https://www.youtube.com/c/thephilosophytube

4. Also, reading things was just plain hard at that time and I think that was part of my phase where I could only stomach the pure fantasticalness of the Outlander books.

5. http://www.freemansign.com/BSMaineDOT.html