Listen to the way we talk about it. We pay attention, spend it, invest it, and lately we are told we are running low. Entire industries now measure it in seconds and sell it in bulk. The phrase attention economy, once a provocation, has become a plain description of how much of the digital world is financed. Somewhere along the way, a faculty that philosophers once treated as close to sacred was quietly redescribed as a commodity, and most of us accepted the new vocabulary without much protest.
The metaphor matters because metaphors shape what we think is possible. If attention is a currency, the best we can do is budget it: guard it from thieves, allocate it wisely, try not to overspend. That is the logic behind most digital wellbeing advice, with its timers and limits and screen-time reports. It is not useless. But it quietly assumes that attention is a quantity, and that the problem is merely one of accounting. Several of the most interesting thinkers of the last century would have disagreed.
Simone Weil, writing in the early 1940s, argued that the true purpose of school studies was not to master geometry or Latin but to train the capacity for attention, which she regarded as the very substance of prayer. For Weil, attention meant a kind of waiting: holding the mind open, emptied of its own agenda, ready to receive what is actually there. She believed that people who are suffering need, above all, someone capable of giving them that kind of attention, and that it is far rarer than we suppose.
A just and loving gaze
Iris Murdoch took up the word in The Sovereignty of Good and made it the centre of moral life. Her famous example is a mother-in-law who finds her son's wife tiresome and common. Nothing outward changes, but over time the older woman looks again, more carefully and more generously, until she sees the younger one as refreshingly direct rather than vulgar. For Murdoch, this inner work of looking is itself moral action. We become good, she suggested, largely through what we practise seeing.
Read alongside these thinkers, the attention economy looks less like a market and more like a formation. What holds our gaze does not simply consume our time. It trains us, shaping what we notice, what we find tolerable and what we are able to love. William James observed long ago that our experience is made of what we agree to attend to. The feed does not merely take attention. It proposes, again and again, a particular kind of self to become.
Oona Farrell, a philosopher of mind at Calder College who has spent years studying the vocabulary of distraction, thinks the budgeting metaphor has made us passive. People treat their attention as a wallet to be protected, she says, when it is closer to a practice to be cultivated. Her proposal is modest and slightly old-fashioned: choose one thing each day to look at for longer than feels comfortable, a face, a painting, a paragraph, and notice what changes.
The attention economy has convinced us that attention is something we give away. It is really something we become.
None of this makes the phone disappear, and none of it excuses the designers who profit from our distraction. But it changes the question. Instead of asking how much attention we have left, we might ask what our attention is making of us. That is a harder question, and a more hopeful one. Currencies can only be spent. A way of seeing can be deepened, and it grows, rather than diminishes, with use.
