In a digitally oversaturated society like ours, distraction is a daily sparring partner. What begins as a quick check of the weather to decide what to wear on a morning run turns into 20 minutes of scrolling political takes or cat videos. Most of us don’t wake up thinking, I’d like to spend two hours watching Seinfeld reruns today, but here we are.
Our devices and internet algorithms are remarkably effective at capturing our attention and redirecting it from whatever we intend. Yet for all the well-earned anxiety about our attention crisis, a troubling tendency in our discourse is to conflate the predicament with concerns about productivity.
We can, and should, care about productivity and attention’s role in it. But when output and efficiency become our primary concern, it distorts the nature of attention. Attention becomes only a means to an end, problematically viewed as merely a “resource.” And the root of this problem is glimpsed in the most basic way we talk about attention: We pay it.
When we pay for something, we expect something beneficial or useful in return. When we pay, we’re the consumer—and we want to know that what we’re paying for is worth the cost. But attention isn’t something we pay. It’s something we should give.
Our language about attention as a transaction reflects the modern economization of everything, including how we think of ourselves. The modern person, according to philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the homo economicus, the “economic man.” Each of us is a “rational” consumer seeking to “obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained.”
Within such a framework, it’s easy to see how attention can be perceived as another resource to maximize for our benefit. But the subtle shift in language—from “pay” to “give”—should, if reflected in what we do, transform how we inhabit our world. When we give attention, we do not angle to use another for our own ends. Instead, as Christians, we seek to obey Jesus through our attention and renounce our selfish impulses to dominate. We’re instructed, after all, that the only way to find our lives is to lose them (Matt. 10:39).
Novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, though not a Christian, wrote that attention involves not only what it directs us toward but also what it directs us away from. Attention gets us out of the way, thereby allowing us to receive whatever the object of our attention gives—what she calls an “unselfing.” Because attention directs us away from ourselves, the natural result is “a decrease in egoism through an increased sense of the reality of, primarily of course other people, but also other things.”
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Murdoch’s views on attention are shaped by the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. What Murdoch called “unselfing” Weil called “decreation,” writing that “the destruction of oneself” through attention to another is “to deny oneself.” In fact, for Weil, who was influenced by Christianity, attention is scarcely distinguishable from prayer.
Attention is something we give, not pay, because it is primarily a way we are present to another, as Murdoch and Weil saw. And that way of being present, especially as Christians, is antithetical to our selfish ends. The real work of attention is getting ourselves out of the way.
In an apt analogy, the theologian Rowan Williams compares prayer to birdwatching. It is waiting for God with “attention and expectancy, an attitude of mind sufficiently free of the preoccupations of the ego to turn itself with openness to what God in Christ is giving.” This is not just true of what we perceive as “quiet time” or any fleeting moment of talking to God. Rather, real attention can be given to anything—to borrow Weil’s example, even geometry!—and can become a kind of prayer as it opens us to experience God.
Such an orientation to the world is intelligible only within the Christian doctrine of creation. The things in our world are worthy of attention, and potentially an encounter with God, only because everything in the world was created good by God.
Imagine discovering, as one lucky picker did, that a recently purchased yard-sale sketch was an original of Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. Setting the unexpected financial value aside, you would likely consider it worthier of attention only in virtue of who drew it. Since God created the world, we have good reason to believe even the most mundane and uninteresting objects are worthy of the gift of our attention.
Thus in The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon famously encourages his readers to look at an onion for an hour. One onion, one hour. Then, he adds:
Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing. … If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil’s Cathedral.
Capon and the old Russian are not looking at onions and church spires as a transaction. In their freely given attention, they open themselves up to the world and God. I’ve not taken up the habit of staring at onions, but I did start sketching as a spiritual discipline. It forces me to look—really look—at the way a tree bark connects to the trunk, and for that moment, I am “unselfed”: I am thinking only of the tree.
We give attention, as Capon says, as image bearers. For Christians, this has a specific meaning: Jesus Christ is the image of God his Father (Col. 1:15), and we are conformed to the image of the Son (Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:18). To give attention does not merely put us in better moral standing or help us amass trophies of productivity. With the help of God’s Spirit, attention rightly given helps us see the world and its people as Jesus did—with compassion (Mark 6:34; Luke 7:13).
To shape new habits of attention, then, we need new ways of thinking and talking about attention. Attention is a gift to be given: a gift of time and of our very selves, allowing our worlds to revolve around something that isn’t us, if only for a moment.
The next time you’re in conversation with a friend, don’t think about what’s for dinner or what new episode is out that evening. Gift your full attention, not expecting anything in return. Ask questions. Be curious. Inhabit their story alongside them. Whatever one thinks about the benefits or dangers of empathy, the desire to lose ourselves and compassionately abide with another is a fundamentally Christian impulse. It is, in fact, what God’s Spirit does for us.
At my church, we partner with Lexington Rescue Mission, an organization that aims to meet the urgent and long-term needs of the most vulnerable in our city. They feed people, help break cycles of addiction, and work tirelessly to move people from the streets into stable housing. There are many critical, tangible needs that must be met, and the people of our church (among many others) sacrifice money and time to help meet them.
In the midst of the overwhelming and urgent needs, the Mission reminds its volunteers that one of the most crucial and profound acts they can do is give attention to those they serve. One volunteer from our church regularly goes to the Mission to be a mentor, but he says that this mostly involves listening. Giving time and money can show you care about a person—but nothing says you care more than the gift of attention.
We can, and should, continue to recognize that attention is useful. It can help me become a better reader of the Bible or a better dad. But true attention isn’t about my productivity. It’s my way of being present to something or someone created by God. It’s something I give to live out my calling to love God and neighbor.
That’s not something we can buy. So let’s not try to pay for it.
Derek King is the scholar in residence at Lewis House, a Christian study center on the University of Kentucky campus.
