This weekend I spoke to a friend who works in film – a world apart from technology. We discussed a potential project, and I realised that he was taking notes by hand – not transcribing for later munching by an LLM, to be regurgitated into sterile bullet points and action items – but listening out for what he considered important.
And it occurred to me that the very act of attention – the things to which we pay attention, are the things we believe to be valuable. For someone who’s entire livelihood rests on creating, on storytelling, and on narrative, the sifting of the infinite inputs and selection of the salient is the first rung on the ladder of taste.
Clearly this goes beyond those labelled as creatives; we all have a specific disposition to the world – worriers point out what could go wrong, optimists discard the risks and get started anyway, cynics trade action for sounding clever. And the beautiful tapestry of civilisation is the interplay of all these modes of attention.
Ultimately the objects that capture our attention and the areas into which we pour sustained attention fabricate our experience. Tending to our mode of attention can profoundly alter our experience of life – everything is downstream of the inputs we privilege.
So now I’m left wondering, what does my specific attention graph look like, and what impact does that have on my experience?