Dear Reader,

I’m writing to you on an airplane, my first since last summer’s pre-Delta lull, trying to ignore the sense of dread that a COVID lull has come to engender.

Instead, I’m focusing on the sort of loopy “living our lives is such a novelty!” glee. I stood sock-footed in the shuffling TSA line! After sprinting to the gate while they were shame-paging my name across the airport, I took the last seat on the plane away from a lap baby! Someone is going to bring me three ounces of Dr. Pepper and I’m going to be so grateful!

I’m also re-remembering the thrill of having no internet and writing from the sky. I listened to a few podcasts about attention this week—how it works, what we get wrong about focus and productivity, how attention is getting stolen from us.

Maybe attention has been on my mind, too, because my Instagram feed seems to have changed in the last few weeks. I only see branded posts and Reels, even more ads than usual, and the little thumbnail auto-play Reels—almost never my actual friends’ actual posts. The app seems very determined that my actual friends’ actual posts are totally passe, and that my disappointment with this state of affairs can be tempered, toddler-distraction-style, by a neverending stream of 10-second videos of pitbull puppies. (On this last point, it is both wrong and not-wrong.)

In my book I kept returning to the image of extraction to talk about how our cultures and systems are designed for burnout. We’re so conditioned to think about things in terms of extraction and exploitation of resources, we have lost a sense of connection, regeneration, or sustainability—everywhere from how we understand learning, to the Earth, to work, to community, to “church growth.”

Our attention has also become a resource that’s efficiently extracted from us and exploited. Conversations about attention and distraction often turn to blaming ourselves, but we aren’t always in control of the situations that demand we fracture our own presence. Many of our jobs consist almost entirely of monitoring an email inbox. Two years into the pandemic, social media is a last vestige of the loose-tie connections we used to foster via gatherings. In the absence of a clear path to action, up-to-the-minute news seems like the only way to be involved or at least bear witness to war, anti-democratic state legislatures, the erosion of women’s rights, and the pandemic’s continuing mass death.

It’s not even just the design of social media or the haphazard way we work that keeps us tethered to our glowing rectangles. When we feel helpless or overwhelmed, the brain is designed to seek out more information and to experience reward when it’s found—even when the information only serves to further overwhelm. So the Internet’s unlimited information, itself, keeps us in a perpetual feedback loop of perpetual scrolling.

Our attentional resources are indeed precious. I’m not only thinking of the close, sustained focus I’m using to write this letter right now, but many dimensions of our capacities for attending to what is most important, what is most present, what is most real—or even to boredom, to the felicitous and unpredictable, to who is missing and what is not being said.

Many of our spiritual and social heroes would agree. Prayer is a function of attention; relationship and community are functions of attention; creativity is a function of attention; our ability to take wise, courageous, and coordinated action for justice is a function of attention.

Every time we make more intentional decisions, gift ourselves with better habits, or stretch our attentional muscles, we are becoming happier, more effective, and more present stewards of our very lives.

I think we can both individually and collectively wrest back a more humane environment in which our brains, bodies, and souls can operate. I feel the rumblings from others made utterly miserable by distraction and longing to reconnect to all the people, places, and things beyond the edges of the screen.

What are you feeling? Are you dreaming of throwing your phone off a cliff, into the ocean, or under a train?

How have you reclaimed your attention lately?

And where are you enjoying hearing from your favorite authors these days? Who’s an author you feel connected to, but not bombarded by? Who’s returning kindness, comfort, laughter, or joy in exchange for your precious attention?

Hit reply and let me know! I’d love to enjoy the ritual of turning my phone back on in another hour to actually talk to you, not blast more at you.

Peace, love, bread, and wine,

Lyndsey

P.S. One of my very favorite ways to stay connected with fellow writers and followers is via podcasts!! My interview on the Faith Fringes podcast came out today; it’s about bodies and burnout in faith deconstruction and reconstruction. Check it out, give Dawn a follow, and join the conversation!

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