Attention, agency, and the direction of time

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How do you choose how to direct your attention?

Are you reacting, as opposed to responding? Something pops up and appears urgent, you forget what you were doing before, or will soon enough. You can easily end up on a flywheel of reactivity here, with a procession of ever-more-urgent demands on your attention causing the long-term things to get neglected, resulting in more emergent demands on your attention, quickly overwhelming your sense of agency over your time and attention and life.

Are you in autopilot mode, with your brain going into energy-saving activities? Vegging out, social media and its simplistic casino-like dopamine hacking, television you don’t even like…unconscious habits you don’t actually desire, but often don’t dislike enough to fight.

Are you deliberately relaxing? You’ve got to do this at some point. If you don’t schedule downtime, it will be scheduled for you. Is it addressing a weight or otherwise obliterating a distraction?

Is it future-oriented? Are you doing a thing that may not feel good or even not-bad immediately, but is in the service of a greater good—be it your own or something more macro?

In the middle of doing the thing, it’s worth asking yourself: is this about what just happened, or about what you want to have happen?

Did that make your day a little better?

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