Belly Button Lint

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Tag: attention

  • Theme:

    Narcissism and Narcotics

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    1–2 minutes

    The root of the word narcotics and narcissism is the same: narcosis, or numbness.

    An interesting way to think about this is a closed-loop system: numbness is avoidance of external stimuli, an obliteration of authentic engagement.

    The narcissist, in this way, is akin to the drug addict: by focusing only internally (your wants, desires, and self-image), it is not that you do not encounter pain, but for a moment, it is all about your pain, and you numb yourself to the travails or needs of other people. This internal focus is an escape from the world into yourself: a numbing of the external mirror that improperly reflects, a return to the internal logic of escapist fantasy.

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    Carrying Grief

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    1–2 minutes

    You cannot grieve constantly, consistently: your mind will slip into distraction or action.

    Yet, as you purposefully walk across the room, you feel a nagging sensation that you have forgotten something. And so, you pick up your grief again and carry it for a while.

  • Theme:

    Attention as Free Will

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    1–2 minutes

    In the attention economy, our capacity to focus is the measure of our free will.

    When attention is commodified and captured by digital devices and advertising, we lose the ability to engage in deep thought -the kind that shapes an authentic self rather than one driven by manufactured desires.

    While we naturally filter countless stimuli to focus on single tasks, our attention is constantly being spent. This spending shapes who we become.

    Critically, we must choose whether we consciously direct our attention (prioritize and focus) or surrender it to external forces that would mold us according to their interests, into their subjects.

    tags insight, perspective]

  • Theme:

    individualism, narcissism, and war

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    1–2 minutes

    “All individualism harbors a strain of narcissism”

    Tim Wu

    Consider that identity politics leverages narcissism, a self-focused vanity. Perhaps, in an attention economy, narcissism is equivalent to greed in a capitalist society: a systemic vice harnessed as fuel.

    The opposition to identitarian narcissism would be communal, national, and external identification.

    However, nationalism is the very thing the Frankfurt school fought against philosophically: national socialism (Nazi) led to the Holocaust, so let’s deconstruct power and tradition to empower the individual. Hence, identity politics claims the importance of individual sovereignty, agency, and authenticity, focusing on the particular at the cost of coherence.

    Fascinatingly, this identity imperative should stop wars through multitudinous disfunction, but the narcissistic need for attention loves escalation, prompting a collective drama in which they can all star.

  • Theme:

    Intensity: Quantity vs Magnitude

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    1–2 minutes

    Henri Bergson reminds us that intensity, particularly in feelings, is less about measurable quantity and more about qualitative magnitude.

    Emotions (feelings) resist precise calculation; they unfold as experiences shaped by perception, memory, and context. While we can measure stress hormones or neural activity, these fail to capture the totality of intensity: the combination of variables in context amplifying each other.

    Our tendency toward availability bias skews this even further, as the present moment overshadows past incidents. Reflection and detachment may help recalibrate our sense of proportion, but to focus on any one event is to empower it beyond measure.

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    Relationships distract from the trauma of relationships

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    1–2 minutes

    Participation in relationships is often avoidance of traumatic conflict.

    Consider that the majority of our trauma and joy (anxiety and happiness) is produced by social participation. Almost all of our “problems” are interpersonal and emotively subjective, similar to any glee or contentment we feel.

    Social participation is a drug: it keeps our lives meaningfully filled with emotions and exciting destabilization, which we re-label as duty, loyalty, or purpose. To be a good person, we must engage in destabilizing manipulations.

    In our moments alone, we become devoid of “meaning,” which, for psychological and practical purposes, is a lack of external stimulation. This lack of external stimulation opens up a moment to confront or examine internal conflicts or personal distress. Rather than dwelling, healing, or accepting these past problems, we rush to create more fresh drama, overlaying the old hurt with the new “responsibility,” distracting and provoking ourselves away from healing.

    We seek out relations to avoid how messed up relations have made us, inevitably manipulating and manufacturing excess mess. Thus, we replicate the behaviors that created our coping style: histrionic, bipolar, manic, flighty, etc., instead of remaining grounded, abiding, and stable.

  • Theme:

    Alarm overload: the hospital

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    1–2 minutes

    Hospitals, designed to heal, paradoxically create an environment that intensifies anxiety and sensory overload. The constant beeps and chirps, each signaling a need, blend into a cacophony of emergencies ignored by habituated staff.

    Patients and families are caught in a disorienting field of incredulity: an alarm should be alarming, so why does no one react?

    This annoying soundscape fosters clinical insanity. Jargon-laden exchanges over walkie-talkies interrupt a family’s soothing attempts at comfort, and brusque nurses ignore requests. The unrelenting stimuli are mirrored by the disregard for concern.

    Peace is stripped, amplifying vulnerability and maddening rage. Here, managerial/institutional desensitization obscures the very purpose of care: to soothe, settle, not stimulate.

  • Theme:

    the attention economy

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    1–2 minutes

    To be awake today is to be sold something.

  • Theme:

    Gusts of Doubt

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    1–2 minutes

    Even at the peak of your balance and focus (your finely honed stability), take enough gusts, and you will look down.

    It is not looking around that leads to dismay, but rather the clarity of unfocused observation that leads to doubt. Widening your view recognizes the precarious fragility of our position.

    Recognition should invoke a fight-or-flight response, but often, we freeze wide-eyed when our ignorance is made plain, preventing us from returning to the stable, narrow focus that served us so well.

  • Theme:

    Pain is shared

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    1–2 minutes

    Pain surrounds us in many forms—loss, death, and the recognition of our own inaction. While death, breakups, and moving are known as life’s most stressful events, watching someone else suffer can be even more agonizing. Their pain, delusion, and inevitable self-destruction mirror our own struggles, leaving us powerless, which amplifies our pain.

    This pain sits heavy in our chest, a signal something is deeply wrong, so we work to dislodge it, to shake it off by thrashing and acting out.

    Pain, both physical and emotional, may start as centripetal (focussing down to a central point) but becomes centrifugal (spreading out) from a broken heart or cut to sweating and shaking to involving others. Pain is shared.

    (partially from Henry Bergson, William James)