I made myself sick the first time I read Harry Potter.
No, I wasn’t crushed by my homeschool guilt of partaking in that pagan witchcraft, though I will admit it took the entire first book for me to get over the feeling that I was doing something wrong. I made myself sick because for a solid week and a half all I did was inhale all 7 books like Tom Hanks in The Terminal when he returned enough carts to pay for those cheeseburgers. I wasn’t sleeping and was only eating when called to dinner by my mom. Eventually, my body had to shut itself down so it could recuperate.
Those were the days, right? I was a homeschooled high school kid who didn’t have a job yet. My time and attention were my own, and things like accidentally spending dozens of hours plowing through a series of books were still possible. I could maybe (italicized, bolded, and underlined maybe) make that happen again, but never by accident. It would take intentionality, not to mention ignoring the voice of wisdom in my head that says that might not be the healthiest choice.
Intentionality is the point. We all have dozens, what may feel like hundreds of things begging for our attention at all times. Some good, some bad, and even the good things have the potential to be prioritized too highly and take too much of our attention. From all of these things fighting for our attention we can surmise one vitally important lesson: your attention is a commodity, and it takes intentionality to decide how to use it.
I know that intentionality with our attention is hard. All of social media, every streaming service, even our email is designed to make it easy to jump on “for just a minute”, but difficult to disconnect. Their profit is dependent on how long they can get you attached to their content, so we get episodes that immediately start one after the other, infinite scroll news feeds, and suggested videos with titles that the algorithm knows we can’t resist. Your attention is a commodity, and they want it.
I’m not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist or to be overwhelming. My hope is that you can have a similar experience to the one I had. I’ve been reading this book titled Stolen Focus in which the author lays all of this out in much greater detail and with actual research. For me, realizing that the number in my screen time notification wasn’t a direct reflection of my lack of self-control was encouraging.
I’m also not trying to let anyone, including myself, off the hook. It’s up to us not only to remove certain things from our attention time but to replace those things with what really deserves our attention. To intentionally choose one thing over another, for where your attention is, there your time will be also.
The need for this in my own life started to become clear to me over my Fridays the past few weeks. Friday for me is most people’s Saturday, as my work week is generally Sunday-Thursday. My plans would never really pan out the way I hoped. I would intend to rest and recover from the work week by starting my day with a cup of coffee and some time in the Word, doing a few chores around the house, maybe visiting the library, watching an episode of whatever show I’m in, then reading the day away. But what ends up happening is maybe I’ll throw a load of laundry in, then I turn on a show and scroll through reels for an embarrassing amount of time. By the end of the day, rather than feeling rested I would feel anxious and overwhelmed.
Maybe you don’t relate to that feeling or any of what I’ve said so far, for that matter. Maybe the number on your screen time notification is next to nothing and when you look back at the choices you’ve made about where to spend your attention, you stand by each one. If that’s the case, I applaud you and hope you’ll send me an email to tell me exactly how you do it. But if you relate to me, directly or indirectly, you don’t need me to tell you why these choices are important. Like me, you’ve probably had days where the decisions to intentionally spend your attention came easy, and the rest and satisfaction at the end of those days is enough to make it worth it.
What you give your attention to matters because it can either give life or it can take it. I don’t know what choices you need to make to be intentional with your attention. Will you let me tell you a few ideas I’m choosing myself to see if that sparks anything for you?
- Setting time limits on social media/video apps, and letting my wife set the passcode.
- Leaving my phone downstairs at night.
- In moments when I would normally pull out my phone and scroll, disrupting the auto impulse by opening the Bible app instead.
Your attention is a commodity. How will you use it?
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