An Antidote to Attention Hell

Last night I gorged in Attention Hell.

If you've dined there before, this will feel familiar: late night. Can't sleep. Pull up YouTube. One click and I'm in. An endless buffet of candy-coated clips on which to feast. Sports highlights, podcast clips, podcast clips commenting on other podcast clips. All dripping with syrupy titles uniquely appealing to my taste buds. Each promising that sweet hit of dopamine.

I inhaled this fiber-less feast for more than an hour. At the end I felt empty, as is required. But I also left with a new level of despair for where we're headed. There's a certain swirl of internet-celebrity-TikTok absorbing more and more stations of the sugar buffet. Names like Portnoy and Paul dominate serve as ringleaders for this mad Attention Economy Hell-on-Earth.

And here's the thing: it's delectable. These internet-famous new-media moguls know how to blend the perfect mix of hype, shock, and controversy into honey-coated cotton candy dusted with pixie sticks and slathered in strawberry syrup. I know it's a one-way to mental diabetes, and I often still can't avoid a quick bite, and then three more.

Today, I found an antidote to the sucrose smorgasbord. The heavenly contrast to Attention Hell. As opposite a type of content as the ever could be. I found it in a 103-year-old book.

The novel is the spiritual opposite of the internet-celebrity-TikTok swirl. Internet sugar hits are extreme, ephemeral, and trivial. Great novels are nuanced, timeless, and profound. I've been drawn to novels more in the past year. Today I decided to review a powerful books I read recently, My Antonia by Willa Cather. Re-reading my favorite passages not only struck me with their depth and beauty. I also realized that novels are rich just as internet puff pieces are impoverished.

I'll leave you with a few favorite of Cather's breathtaking work. My hope is that I can train my mind to always seek out fibrous prose rather than the empty temptations of the Attention Hell buffet.

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.

Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

___________

Antonia lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.

It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.