The skim
What if attention isn’t the problem?
This newsletter has been weirdly hard to write lately. I used to have no problem coming up with things to say and share, trained as I was in the ways of Twitter. When all else failed, I knew could take a piece I’d read online and write 280 words about it instead of 280 characters. Barely any more work; a lot more engagement and reward. But recently, when I try to think of articles to share, recommend, or react to, I’ve been coming up empty more often than not.
I thought, for a while, that the demise of Twitter and the ongoing AI immolation of the web meant I was struggling to find things to read online, or at least things far enough outside my regular rotation of magazine and newsletter subscriptions to make sharing them feel novel and fun. But one glance at my enormous, varied, and growing Safari reading list suggests that my problem isn’t finding things. My problem is reading them.
More and more, I’ve found myself starting pieces when I know I won’t have time to finish them—or worse, interrupting myself a third of the way through even though I do have time to sit there and read to the end. I’m skimming the beginnings of articles to figure out if I want to come back to them later and “really” read them. Except that later never comes. The only online reading I’m finishing these days is stuff I don’t care about, because it never makes me think, I should save this for when I have time to enjoy it. I just gobble it up and forget about it, having successfully “incinerate[d] a few more seconds of my one life on earth” and nothing more.
All my self-interruptions and surface skimming make it sound like the problem is my attention, finally degraded into dust two decades after I first logged into Facebook. But in contexts beyond online reading, my attentional muscles are pretty strong. I have no problem giving my full attention to books, movies, TV, conversations, real world experiences, or my own writing, at least most of the time. I don’t second-screen. I don’t have access to an infinite scroll. So what’s going on? Why have I had ten browser tabs open on my phone for six months (in addition to dozens more in my reading list), all of which I genuinely want to read and all of which I don’t read, day after day after day?
The attention framework wasn’t getting me closer to solving the problem, so I’m trying a new one. What if my problem isn’t attention, but intention? Once I choose what to pay attention to, I do it. So perhaps the issue is that I’m not really choosing. Especially in those interstitial or transitional spaces in the day, I pick up my phone without deciding why or what I’m going do with it. And then the habitual movements take over: the swipe, the scroll, the context switch. All of which are easier and more immediately pleasurable on the iPhone 16 I got in November than they were on the iPhone 8 it replaced. Despite my best efforts, my phone is telling me what to do, and my phone wants me to skim.
Maybe everyone else realized this in 2015. But when it comes to attention and intention, I always thought that what I put on my phone, or didn’t, mattered more than the fact of the phone itself. Honestly, there’s so much good stuff on there. It’s just waiting for me to choose it.
