The new attention disorder

The three weeks on campus that preceded Dean’s Date and finals felt eternal. But what was most painful was having no idea what to do with myself after I did eventually finish all of my schoolwork. Many of us went from a frantic working pace and wanting nothing more than a short break, to having no idea what to do with ourselves. What is most depressing are not the challenges that we expect to be unpleasant, but rather when the thing that we hope will bring relief is itself another burden.

For the first few hours after finishing our work, we enjoyed hanging out with friends and the ability to just sit around in leisure. Yet, soon afterwards, we simply didn’t know what to do with our time. The boredom that follows finishing our work reveals a certain emptiness. We’ve learned how to pay attention to things that are put in front of us, but we haven’t stopped and considered what is worth paying attention to when those assignments are no longer being handed out.

The lack of relief after finishing the semester left me with a horrifying vision of my life as a series of successfully completed tasks, but with little accomplishment and no satisfaction, a yoke successfully carried nowhere. Is there nothing that I want to do after I’ve fulfilled all my to-do lists? Is there no meaning I look to after accomplishing all my to-do list? No purpose? At the end of it all, not rest, no “R&R,” just boredom filled by nothing more than Instagram scrolling and endless streaming of one movie after another?

At Princeton we learn how to focus on tasks that we often have no personal desire to fulfill. This large attention span accomplishes nothing if we don’t also develop our own criteria for deciding what we want to and ought to do once our superiors stop making these decisions for us.

David Foster Wallace suggests that one of the hardest things to do in life is to learn how to intentionally choose to what we will pay attention, rather than just falling into the default modes of existence, without independent decision making. He writes, “I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about ‘teaching you how to think’ is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: ‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to…” There is no point in having the ability to pay attention for long hours if we do not know what we want or ought to be paying attention to.

We are all good at completing assignments and we excel at following directions. But our mental awareness should not be solely occupied with the endless treadmill of tasks and expectations that are placed in front us. It would be a tragedy for us to live our whole lives with our heads down, tending diligently to whatever we are presented with, only to find later in our lives that we never attended to what was actually worth our attention. If paying attention is a kind of worship, we would do well to make sure that we are not just worshipping golden calves. What a horror to find that we have worshipped efficiency, only to find that we’d moved in a direction that did not really matter. How terrifying to one day realize that we are little more than a dog chasing tires, that we have no clue what to do with ourselves once we actually have the freedom we work so hard to attain.

We all develop an ability to focus on things. But if that focus is too tied up in completing tasks and moving onwards and upwards, we will miss some really big ways in which we are supposed to apply our attention. If our attention is only task-oriented, then we’ve missed out on one of the biggest things our education was supposed to empower us with, which is not just the ability to complete tasks, but to analyze which tasks we ought to invest in in the first place.

I won’t pretend to tell anyone what those things are. I am simply more and more conscious of a desire to live in such a way that when we’re old and gray and can’t work anymore, we still have things that we think are worth paying attention to. I want to have lived in such a way that I am proud of the things I have paid attention to, that I’ve dedicated my life to what’s real and important.

As Wallace says, “the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” There’s no final exam for that class, no break or boredom afterwards, but it is a task you can give yourself every day.

Luke Gamble is an English major from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.