Paying attention is more important than you think

Simone Weil, the great 20th century thinker and writer, wrote an essay entitled “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with View to the Love of God,” that upon reading made me uneasy. She argues that the ultimate purpose of being a student is developing the capacity for paying attention.

As students, we spend the bulk of our time learning. In order to truly learn anything, Weil thinks, you must first open yourself up to the subject at hand, focus on it and wait to receive its content. Learning is not a process of memorizing facts or formulas, but of patient reception.

To Weil, attention is a sacred channel of human receptivity and connection. It is our primary way of relating to the world around us. It naturally follows that what we pay attention, and how we do so, greatly shapes and reflects the state of our inner selves.

An attentive person can share a lengthy conversation without checking his or her phone or read a book for hours. They are attentive to the world around them because the world inside of them is not the most important thing. They can focus because he or she is not self-obsessed, and that is because you must first put yourself aside to pay close attention to anything.

To put it another way, true attention is an act of self-denial. When we pay attention, we stop thinking exclusively about ourselves and what we want in life, and instead, we focus on something else.

The main point of Weil’s essay is to imagine attentiveness as a sacred way of life, which is what unsettled me. I’ve read many articles and some books on the subject of distraction and never felt included in the conversation. I hardly check my Facebook and I don’t have any other social media, so whenever I read or talk about the reality of our distracted age, I can stand above it all, an observer rather than a participant.

It’s true that our age — not just our generation, but even our parents — is distracted. I could cite Pew Research Center polling data to make my point, but a personal challenge will suffice instead: Sit on a bench on the Plaza of the Americas or Turlington Plaza and watch people who walk by. Count the bent heads and the headphones. Better yet, when you have some free time in your schedule, or you’re bored, try to resist spending it on a device. Resist answering texts or emails while you’re talking to another person. If you are eating lunch alone, resist Twitter or YouTube; just sit there, eating.

None of these tasks would be easy for any of us. Even for those who are not that present online, distraction abounds — text messages, emails, phone calls and articles. It is universally difficult to give good attention. Weil unsettled me because she was right when she wrote, “That is why every time we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.” It’s not that we can’t focus because of our phones, but that we don’t want to focus, so we use our phones. In other words, our fight is not against technology, but against ourselves.

We don’t want to focus because we naturally find ourselves to be more interesting than anything or anyone around us. Rather than open ourselves to the world in order to receive its content, we impose our wants and desires, onto it. We think of life as our personal documentaries. It’s a chance for the world to know our story, rather than a space to let others flourish. If attention is the fruit of selflessness, inattention and boredom are the fruits of selfishness, the inability to care for anything but the self.

Weil was right to call this evil, yet it resides in all of us, this self-possession. What should we do about it? Admitting that we, not our devices, are the problem is a great start, but it is just that: a start. It’s the first step in a journey of many more necessary steps. It is tempting to solve the issue of distraction with specifics like better time-management or self-help; perhaps instead what is needed here is not so much a program of self-improvement, but a path of self-forgetfulness. Perhaps we need to lose, not help, our selfish selves.

Scott Stinson is a UF English senior. His column appears Wednesdays.