The Geography of Attention: Where Are You Looking?

Most people think about attention in terms of what it is. It is focus. It is concentration. It is the currency of the digital age, the thing everyone is trying to harvest and monetize and redirect.

What they think about less is where...

Where your attention lives is not incidental to its quality. Your attention lives entirely inside a glowing rectangle; it takes on the characteristics of that space. It becomes fragmented. Reactive. Endless. It is designed to be easily captured and quickly spent.

But attention has a geography. It exists in physical space. When you look at a horizon, your attention broadens. When you look at a screen, it narrows. When you walk through a forest, your attention diffuses, taking in the rustle of leaves, the shift of light, the uneven ground. It becomes ambient. The geography of your attention dictates the quality of your thought.

The mission this week is to change the geography of your attention.

Take it out of the digital ecosystem and put it somewhere physical. Look at something that is not trying to sell you anything. Look at something that does not have an algorithm behind it. Look at something that will not change if you refresh it.

It could be the grain of the wood on your desk. It could be the way the light hits the building across the street. It could be the water.

When you change where you are looking, you change how you are thinking. You step out of the machine's geography and back into your own.

And sometimes, that is the most radical thing you can do.