The Great American Attention Famine
With an Art Museum Kicker
You want to know why Cal Newport’s books sell faster than cheap whiskey at a NASCAR tailgate? Or why nicotine pouches are vanishing from gas station shelves like canned beans before a hurricane?
It’s because we’re starving. Starving for focus, a kind of attention that doesn’t dissolve into a TikTok scroll or a dopamine hit from the all-mighty algorithm.
Test yourself. Grab any book (doesn’t matter if it’s Thoreau or an owner’s manual for your manscaped lawn mower, you deviant). Read for fifteen minutes. No phone, no coffee run, no peeking at the clock. If your mind starts wandering to what’s for dinner or that email you forgot to send, congratulations: you’re as screwed as the rest of us.
But don’t cry into your craft beer yet. You can claw your way back. Start simple. Lock yourself in a room, pop a nicotine pouch if you need the jolt, and read those fifteen minutes like your soul depends on it. Do it daily, preferably twice (once in the morning and once at night), and you’ll start to feel the fog lift.
Some of you, though, are worse off. You’re not just distracted: you’re a mental vagrant, your default mode network shambling through life like a post-apocalyptic hermit jonesing for a signal from a dead satellite.
For you, the gentle stuff won’t cut it.
You need the hard medicine: crack open some poetry and wrestle with it like it’s a bar fight. Or try mindfulness meditation, sitting still and watching your thoughts scuttle by. Hell, even mindful listening’ll do: mentally repeat what someone’s saying, word for word, without chewing on what it means.
Think of them as mental push-ups.
There are tons of options, as varied as physical exercise. Scroll through your X feed long enough, and you’ll see every jackass with a kettlebell or a yoga mat preaching a new way to move. Every twitch, every twist, every grunt to failure is exercise if you do it right.
Same with your brain.
Take anything—reading, weeding the garden, shooting the bull or billiard balls—and do it with a pinch of wonder. Tell that nagging left brain of yours, the one whining about emails and errands, to STF-up. Lean into the moment with your right hemisphere’s quiet curiosity, and you’ve got yourself a focus workout.
An Experiment in Art-Gazing
Take this outfit in New York, written up in a 2024 New Yorker piece called “The Battle for Attention.” They’re so desperate they’ve turned art museums into mental boot camps. Picture it: a bunch of urbanites shuffling through marble halls, staring at paintings like they’re decoding alien glyphs. Their routine’s got four steps, seven minutes each:
Encounter: They drift through the museum, soaking up the chaos like new tourists in the craze of Mexico City.
Attending: Each picks one painting and stares at it, giving it their whole heart, no wandering.
Negation: They try to erase the painting from their minds, like wiping a chalkboard clean.
Realizing: They ask themselves, “What does that work of art need?”
Afterward, they hunker down in a corner and scribble their thoughts like mad poets, then hit a café to jaw about it over expensive coffee.
Sounds like the kind of thing you’d find in a Greenwich Village basement full of berets and existential dread, right?
Right.
But no.
It’s the kind of thing many (most? all?) of us need in these desperate left-hemispheric times.
Let’s face it: When your mind’s as scattered as a trailer park after a tornado, you might just need to get a little weird. You gotta do what you can to survive and thrive. So maybe give it a whirl. Your brain’s begging for it.