The Tyranny of Attention
Life, at times can be very tedious and exhausting. These days I feel suspended in a thick black fluid slowing my every movement. The primary culprit, shift work.
Shift work, the empty kind that produces nothing of real substance, is a plague upon the Earth. It disintegrates one’s ability to give proper attention to the activities one needs to find true fulfillment. I notice how in the workplace there are those around me who hate to think, as if critical thinking is an alien concept. They can’t read, despite knowing how. They despise poetry, art, and philosophy, anything that requires focused attention as they must spend that attentive focus on their empty labour in pursuit of even the most meagre wages required for them to live.
In her explorations of the human condition, Hannah Arendt posited that focused attention was required for any sort of critical thought. Attention is an active pursuit not something done idly in the subconscious. One must rid oneself of distractions if one wishes to have any hope of penetrating the surface of reality, that is to say, to see past the appearances and reach the underlying reality of phenomena. The ability to attentively focus and actively (not passively) pay attention is critical to the cultivation of wisdom…
