How to Stop Giving Your Attention Away

The myth about self-care that our world wants you to believe

Hello friend,

How’s your breath? How’s your heart?

Moving back to the US after six years of living in Canada has given me some perspective on, well, a lot of things. If I’m being totally honest I really missed living in the States and I’m happy to be back. And yet, there’s obviously so much to critique and be upset about (the price of my monthly health insurance, for one). Like most American’s, my relationship to my home country is complicated.

To state the obvious, a lot has happened in this country (and the world) since 2017- the year I moved to Canada. The country I left in 2017 is not the same one I returned home to in late 2023.

Something that I’ve been confronted with a lot since I moved back has been the effect late-stage capitalism, and more specifically the shift to an attention economy, has had on our ability to take care of our Selves. The basis of the attention economy is rooted in the fact that as humans our capacity to pay attention is limited and therefore a scarce commodity. Instead of just our money, companies are now vying for our finite attention and profiting when they learn how to control it. As a result, we are now told that we have to buy back our attention through increasingly expensive self-care products and services that offer us ways to disengage, disconnect, and retreat from the world in which we live.

Here lies our problem.

Late capitalism has unfortunately caused us so much stress that we’ve internalized the belief that disengagement is better for us because it’s alternative (i.e. engagement in the world as we know it) is simply too much to handle. We’ve prioritized convenience and ease because our nervous systems can’t handle anything else. Yet the result of disengagement and convenience is more and more people experiencing dissociation, depression, anxiety, derealization (the feeling that nothing is authentic or real), disconnection, and withdrawal from the things that not only cause them stress, but also bring them joy.

One distinct trait of late-stage capitalism in our western world is that it likes to sell individual solutions to symptoms rather than getting to the root cause of the collective issues. This ad-hoc band-aid approach has created the pervasive idea that self-care and wellness should be convenient and easy, if only you could afford this supplement, or that $10k hot-cold therapy set-up. Not only is this assumption not true, but it’s also causing us even more harm than if we were to do the necessary work required to heal our traumas, connect to community, and form discipline around the practices that help us find presence.

In Johann Hari’s book Lost Connections, he emphasized that what we “really need are connections. But what you are told you need, in our culture, is stuff and a superior status, and in the gap between those two signals - from yourself and from society - depression and anxiety will grow as your real needs go unmet.”

The ubiquitous narrative around self-care is that if you just retreat or disengage for a little longer- if only you just had a bit more vacation time- your burnout and overwhelm and existential dread will fade away and then you’ll be ready to hop back on the treadmill.

But why must the goal always be to hop back on the treadmill that is causing us to dissociate in the first place?

Personally, I don’t want to have to “intentionally disconnect” from the world around me just to feel like I have any semblance of control of my attention. I don’t want to have to pay a monthly membership fee to a sensory deprivation tank. I don’t want to pay thousands of dollars to go in a dark room for 5 days just so that I can connect back to my Self. I don’t want to have to do digital detoxes every six months to reclaim my time. I don’t want to be constantly seeking for the “solution” to a problem that’s not even mine to begin with.

I don’t want to have to buy back the only thing that is mine and mine alone.

Jenny Odell in her book Saving Time speaks about this phenomenon in depth. She states that “slow living is now ‘for sale’ and approaches a consumerist lifestyle mostly for middle-class metropolitan dwellers.” She further explains that buying slowness and self-care is not only inaccessible to most, but that it is actually causing harm to all of us because it keeps us on the treadmill. She emphasizes that for many privileged people, their reaction to burnout is to build “fortifying walled gardens of slowness, minimalism, and authenticity…such a reaction makes it easier for people to forsake the world” and not address the larger systemic issues that are keeping us stuck and depressed.

To be crystal clear, I’m not suggesting this is only a US problem. This is a problem in Canada, too, as it is around the world. I’ve been trying to understand why it feels so much more pervasive in the US than ever before, and to be honest I think it’s a perfect storm of some personal and societal factors that feel too complex to go into detail here (maybe in a later post). The fact is that it is tangible when I leave my apartment or check my phone to find a text from yet another company trying to sell me something.

To protect our attention there does need to be an opting-out, but not the kind that the trillion-dollar wellness industry is trying to sell us. We can opt-out of the treadmill entirely. We can reclaim our attention by recognizing that it is simply not for sale. Period.

This invites us to be radically aware of our values and if we are living in alignment with them. This invites us to compassionately yet firmly say “no thank you” when the mind inevitably gets swept up in the more more more mentality, as it will. This requires us to step more fully into our bodies and listen to the whispers of the heart when it invites in rest, connection, and healing. It requires us to opt-out of the attention economy, and engage more fully with simple pleasures of our natural world.

In Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, they speak of a study that found that “people were happiest when they were just talking to one another, when they gardened, knitted, or were involved in a hobby; all of these activities require few material resources, but they demand a relatively high investment of psychic energy [i.e. attention]. Leisure that uses up external resources, however, often require less attention, and as a consequence it generally provides less memorable rewards.”

As Jenny Odell says, “accepting a life with less of a certain type of ambition is not the same thing as settling for a life with less meaning.” I’d venture to say that it might actually bring us more meaning if we pursue our own definition of ambition; ambition related to being more radically present and engaged with the world around us. An ambition to be more kind. An ambition to be more generous, more connected, more whole.

The biggest plot twist in moving back to the States has been that I haven’t felt this engaged and present in a long time. The palpable pull from the attention economy has made me want to engage with the natural world around me even more. It’s made me get clearer on my boundaries: where I will allow my attention to go and where/what I will not. It’s made me step into my values with more fervor and dedication than I ever needed to when I was living in Canada. It’s made me commit to the daily practices that help steady my attention and body. It’s made me get really clear on where I want to spend my time, energy, and resources. Being confronted and maintaining presence with the discomfort of the capitalistic world around me has made me feel even more whole and alive, because it’s made me step more fully into who I am and where I’m going.

The antidote to the attention economy is not to find ways to periodically disengage from the realities of the world, it’s to engage more with the things that make us feel alive and whole.

We, as humans, need to feel engaged to feel whole. We enjoy the feeling of rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty with a project or deep conversation. We’re meant to be a part of the world around us. We’re meant to get lost in the beauty of a good movie or art project. We’re wired to find fulfillment and meaning from overcoming trials and tribulations. We’re supposed to be able to choose where we place our attention and be wholly present with that choice. We find joy and pride when we can commit to something for an extended period of time. We’re meant to be in the world, not just observing it from our smartphones or TVs.

It’s time that we all get honest on where our attention is going, and begin the slow but necessary process of reclaiming it, one breath at a time.

I’ll be right there alongside you,

The part taking back what is mine

top knot

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A sprinkling of announcements, journal prompts, & other great reads

• IN PERSON: Somatic Therapeutic Coaching in Austin, TX

  I am SO thrilled to announce that I am now taking 1:1 in-person clients in the greater Austin area. I am trained in therapeutic modalities like Somatic Experiencing, emotion-focused therapy, EMDR, breathwork, and internal family systems. I support those suffering from the effects of childhood trauma, sexual abuse, depression, burnout, and more. If you’re feeling called, respond directly to this email and we can plan a free consult call to see if we’d be a good fit.

• Journal Prompts to ponder:

  • Where have I been giving away my attention without my consent? (no judgment, just curiosity)

  • Do an audit of your ambition. Where have you been putting your energy lately? How would you define the ambition you want to be pursuing?

• No doubt this week’s letter to you was inspired by

  Molly Caro May
  and her recent post “Sabbatical #2 Who are you accountable to?”

• “Doing things for the sake of it: on private joys” by

  Madeleine Dore

• “Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center” by

  Anne Helen Petersen