Pay Attention

In a Far Side cartoon, two mosquitoes sit side by side feeding on a human arm. One is engorged to the point of bursting. Her alarmed companion cries, “Pull out, Betty! Pull out! You’ve hit an artery.”

Although Gary Larson created the cartoon more than four decades ago, I can’t think of a more apt description of social media consumption. Its addictive allure has stolen the attention of millions, if not billions, much of it stoking outrage, deepening the polarizing divides that so afflict us today. But what might it mean to “pull out”?

I have a friend who quits social media at least once a month. Inevitably, she comes back. This isn’t a criticism, I’ve done the same. It turns out, though, that pulling out isn’t so simple. If it’s not social media, it’s an email from a friend loaded with an article inviting me to share her righteous indignation, or a conversation overheard in a restaurant or on public transportation. In “The Dilemmas of Digital Samsara,” David McMahan writes that “it is tempting to fashion a narrative of the heroically mindful individual wresting herself from control by the oppressive digital forces that threaten to subsume her into the matrix.” Yet, given the Buddhist teachings on nonself, individual agency is only one part of the story. It’s not simply a matter of self-control, McMahan points out, “but also a matter of politics and culture.” It’s the water we swim in. We are embedded in a web of causes and conditions, only some of which yield to personal will.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of categorically dismissing the value of social media. There is plenty of useful information to be found; affinity groups abound, and because of it, far-flung family and friends can stay in touch with one another. Yet it is not a useful medium for reasoned argument or consensus building. More than anything, it seems to affirm Anna Karenina’s complaint to Levin: “What do they want to argue for? No one ever convinces anyone, you know.” In fact, social media favors the reverse: Outrage sells. It’s the juiced-up logic of the now quaint editorial saw, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

In an earlier editorial, I set out to temper my dark view of AI by noting its usefulness, pointing out that if we train AI the way we train our minds, we might get somewhere good. I’m not so sure the analogy works: AI is only a pale reflection of the human mind, and “training” it is merely a matter of sucking up vast stores of data. Discernment isn’t on the menu. There simply is no substitute for training the mind to direct its attention to what is useful. And, as McMahan makes clear, it’s not for the individual alone to change the culture of attention; it’s a collective effort that falls to all of us.

In “Mindfulness Is a Lifestyle Change,” Sayadaw U Tejaniya, the Burmese meditation teacher, reminds us that after retreat, the real work begins when we get home: “Right effort is staying in it for the long haul,” he writes; “The more we understand the forces of nature and how they work, the more we begin to rely on the laws of nature to let things unfold in a steady way.” It, likewise, makes sense to understand the nature of the mind and how it works—and the patterns it follows when it gets lost. With countless self-serving demands on our attention, it becomes an ethical imperative to turn our attention to the values our practice supports. And, if we are to be effective, it requires a collective effort to face, even reverse, the ravages of our own creations.

–James Shaheen
Editor-in-Chief