When I was training for the decathlon in college, I noticed that multiple coaches for different events would use the word “attack”. They told me to attack the hurdle; attack the bar; attack the board. Eventually, I asked them if they could explain what they meant in different words because surely attack meant a different thing in the context of each event. Sometimes the word attack mapped onto a specific cue that I wasn’t getting. Like that I should be leaning forward more over a hurdle or taking a shorter penultimate step before the board in long jump. But other times, it just meant (as I thought it did), “fine technique; try doing it faster”. Enlightening either way. It struck me how easy it is to lose information by using conceptual metaphors without anyone noticing. I think sports is very susceptible to this because the metaphor of attack is so common, and familiarity often masquerades as understanding. I would never have noticed unless I had multiple coaching using it in such different ways.

This kind of metphoric misunderstanding can be especially insidious. It causes you to live in the world of the metaphor instead of the real, complex world. (Disclaimer: I think this is fine a lot of the time, but that’s a whole different essay.) But if your simplified metaphoric understanding doesn’t match others’, it gets hard to communicate about things. For instance, if I had never cleared it up, I probably would have continued trying to run faster over hurdles with bad technique, and my coach and I would have gotten continually more frustrated with each other.

Before reading ahead, take a moment to survey yourself. Do you feel like your attention has been scattered, fractured, stolen, or destroyed?

I think this is a classic example of a question that presupposes too much. I see people argue all the time about whether or not social media destroys attention (and it’s not just because I keep an eye out for those especially). But people so rarely stop to ask whether attention is the sort of thing that can be destroyed. Or better, what that even means. I’m going to try answering this question in two directions. First descriptively: what people seem to mean when they say this. Then prescriptively (sort of): what do the words mean together.

Descriptive

In my experience, when people will use their attention being destroyed as a catch-all for any number of distinct but related unhappinesses caused by their phones or social media or email or the Internet. Some evidence of this is the fact that I don’t even know whether to say phones, social media, the Internet, or email. I’ll probably just lazily use phone or interchange them for the rest of this. Here is a nonexhaustive list of few problems that I think people are talking about that I just thought of:

• Checking your phone too often
• Filling any empty moments by checking your phone
• Spending too long on phone at a stretch
• Thinking too much about social media while offline
• Being physically interrupted by notifications
• Being unable to concentrate on a single task for a long stretch

I don’t want to imply that any of these are not problems. In fact, I left them vague because if you feel like you’re checking your phone too often or if it’s getting in the way of your life, then it probably is a problem regardless of how often that is. Of course, if it’s not, the solution may be “stop feeling so guilty about checking your phone”.

Prescriptive

Again, I urge you to take a moment to pause and reflect on how you would define attention or healthy attention. I do this, not simply to encourage active reading, but because I want you to share my pain. It’s not easy, is it? I think attention is simple enough. I like this quote from Oliver Burkeman, “[I]t’s a little bit of an understatement to call [attention] a resource. I just sort of is your life, right?” Basically, every time you’re thinking about something, you’re paying attention, or attending, to it. These could be things in the physical world, a person’s face, pushing a big boulder up a hill, a math problem or thoughts generated inside your head, imagining a person’s face, making moral judgemets, or solving a math problem.

Intact attention is harder to define. At least for me. But for something to be destroyed, it must have been intact. I tried to start getting traction by starting from ADHD and describing the opposite. The issue is that I ended up in a place where it sort of just made total sense that neurotypical people are all addicted to their phones. I think it’s best explained with an analogy and some folk evolutionary psychology. The same way humans evolved to crave sugar and are now ill-suited to an environment where high-energy foods are plentiful, humans evolved to get distracted easily and attend to stimulating things (ignore the tautology) and are now ill-suited for the environment where stimulation is always available. Then to extend the analogy, just like (sustainable) healthy eating involves some desire and environment management to achieve in moderation, so does healthy attention. Annoyingly but unsurprisingly, it seems like moderation looks different for everyone. One person may be able to function pretty well and be happy while receiving a ton of notifications all the time, while another may not even be able to have a Twitter account without their life falling apart.

Out of this context, destroy isn’t too hard to define, but we haven’t exactly done ourselves favors with our definition of attention. Obviously, if healthy attention implies balance, then unhealthy attention implies lack of balance. But “destroyed” has more of an irreversible quality to it. If healthy attention is a balanced see-saw and unhealthy attention is an unbalanced see-saw, destroyed attention is a playground ripped apart by a tornado. Not only is there no balance, there’s no path back to balance.

Overall, I feel pretty confident in saying that it’s just a catchy, hyperbolic phrase that a lot of people have latched onto to describe their problems. I certainly wouldn’t say any of the examples I thought of constitute destruction even in the most extreme cases. But at the same time, it’s worrying if/that people feel this is out of their control. (And I didn’t even mention the passive voice.)

I did want to declare my conflicts of interest here at the end. I like using my phone and social media, so it would be nice if there’s not really a problem and I don’t have to worry about it.