It isn’t to gainsay Weil’s awe-inspiring openness to every current event and its emotional impact to observe that few of us could function this way. Attention is a finite resource, and our sanity depends on not struggling to care about everything. We must protect a zone of focus for the local and personal — the feeling of the sun on your skin, a conversation with friends over pasta or an exchange of terrible jokes with your 7-year-old.
In an attention economy, the truly valuable commodity isn’t the news itself but your eyeballs. Even the most responsible media organization, activist group or political campaign is incentivized to present each story or cause as even more alarming than the next, in an effort to win the attentional arms race. It’s easy to find yourself, metaphorically speaking, living inside the news cycle — treating the latest campaign developments or polling data as somehow more real than your home, career, neighborhood or friends. It’s a grim irony that many people thus mesmerized by the news feel themselves to be fighting for democracy’s survival, when the total colonization of inner life by politics is a traditional hallmark of totalitarianism.
It would be one thing if this nervous fixation at least helped us make a difference in the wider world. And it can seem that way: Scrolling, sharing and refreshing on social media certainly simulates the feeling of efficacy, as if you’re acting on the news, not just watching it in slack-jawed panic.
But the attempt to care about everything impedes taking concrete action on anything. The admonishment that if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention belongs to an era when attention was abundant. What our current era demands, by contrast, is often a willingness to withhold attention, even from some causes and stories that matter, and to be willing to pick battles. Doing so will make you more effective as a volunteer, activist or donor in whatever battles you do pick while retaining your ability to assert primacy over your own mind.
The other sense in which our anxieties represent a failure to reckon with human limitation is that what we’re worried about lies in the future, even if the election is just a couple of days away. And yet the future always escapes our attempts to feel secure about it because we’re hopelessly trapped in the present, unable to really know what’s coming next. Here, too, there’s solace to be found in learning to reel in one’s attention, from speculation about what might happen to what’s happening now. Even when the future fills you with foreboding, your only option, and thus your only responsibility, as Carl Jung observed, is to do “the next and most necessary thing.”
