My brother recently told me about an incident at his neighborhood park. A toddler was found crying, lost, looking for his dad. Someone noticed and called out for help. The dad was sitting a few yards away, phone in hand, scrolling, almost as if he had forgotten where he was, and who he was with.

This incident was particularly vivid, and the embarrassment would likely correct his behavior, much as a near-accident while texting and driving can shake you awake to what's important. The intensity of the moment creates a trigger for change.

But there are far more mundane things we do that may be just as bad, but are more insidious.

A couple at a restaurant, sitting across from each other, both scrolling on their phones. Physically present, mentally elsewhere. People reaching for their phone in the few seconds they're stuck in traffic, or in the checkout line at a grocery store, as if even a few seconds of stillness is something to be optimized for. A train full of people with their heads buried in their phones and ears packed with earphones, sealing off two of their main senses from the real world. You notice it most when you step inside, just before you do the same and become one of them.

We sense that there's something wrong about this. We'd like not to do it, and yet we can't seem to fight it. It's like knowing exactly what goes into a fast-food burger - the suffering of animals killed for it, the chemicals they are fed or treated with, the environmental hazards of industrial farming, the humans exploited for it, the whole ugly picture - and still not being able to stop ourselves from craving it. There's a voice inside us that whispers that it's bad, but there's a force that makes us do it anyway. We feel like we're not in control of our behaviors, yet we're increasingly told that it's a result of our own doing - that we're either ignorant, or that we lack willpower, discipline, or both.

When I looked to see whether there was a word for it, I found that early philosophers called it "akrasia" - acting against your own better judgment, knowing what's right and doing the wrong thing anyway.

By some measures, the global average time spent on social media per user is 2 hours and 21 minutes - roughly 10% of a day.

To put that into perspective, getting two extra hours of sleep over several weeks has been shown to sharpen memory, regulate mood, reduce the risk of heart disease, and lower cortisol, the stress hormone that makes you anxious, short-tempered, and prone to bad decisions. The irony is that those late hours, in bed, in the dark, are the very hours we reach for our phones most easily. That's not a coincidence.

But the problem isn't just the amount of time. It's the addiction and, more importantly, what we trade for it.

A common theme that emerges through all these behaviors is that we're not paying attention to what's important: the humans and non-humans around us and the physical world we're in.

One of the most common arguments against screen addiction is that it reduces our attention span. In conversations, somebody mentions it, everybody nods, and we move on. But there's clearly more to it than that because we can manage to binge-watch TV or doom-scroll for hours. Even toddlers - famously incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes - seem to have no problem watching Cocomelon for an hour straight. That's not a short attention span. At least not the way we think about it.

I find it a strange contradiction. We've learned enough about attention to use it to our advantage, at the cost of getting our children addicted—there's a reason parents hand a digital device to their kids in restaurants, on long flights, or while eating. But we haven't learned enough to defend ourselves against those same techniques.

And despite all the good reasons I have for why screens are harmful, I have never really understood them. I've parroted them. I haven't thought seriously enough about why they have the effects that they do, what "attention" even means, why it matters, what happens when we lose control of it, and why so few of us can change our behaviors even when we know something's wrong. My takes, I realized, were formed by unknowingly memorizing various tweet-sized thoughts that I had scrolled past. I suspect that may be true for a lot of people.

Attention is one of those words that's so common yet so elusive that it's best defined recursively. Attention is our capacity to pay attention. We know it when we have it, and we notice when we don't. But it's hard to describe it.

In 1890, William James wrote, "Everyone knows what attention is," in The Principles of Psychology. A 2019 paper published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics was titled "No one knows what attention is." So which is it?

The word "attention" recently gained new prominence in technology circles with a computer science paper called Attention is All You Need. It proposed an architecture for generative AI that made ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini possible. In it, attention is how neural networks mathematically weigh every word against every other word to "make sense" of the context. I read it and understood the term in that narrow, technical sense.

Then, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a paper called Attention is All They Need: Cognitive Science and the (Techno)Political Economy of Attention in Humans and Machines. The title was obviously a play on the first paper, but this one examined human attention. The paper immediately piqued my interest.

I found it extremely engaging, but also demanding, given its academic nature. There were sections that required multiple passes and places where, just as I thought I had built a good understanding, I would miss the bigger picture. I kept at it for two weeks, reading the entire paper at least five times, before it clicked. It was time well spent.

I came away understanding attention in a way that lets me reason about our relationship with technology. I understood why technology companies do what they do, and why we find it hard to resist. I'm conscious now of when and why I reach for my phone. And I see the deliberate designs in every app, every feed, every interface, meant to maximize engagement and grab attention.

There's a lot I want to articulate to myself through writing, but it's hard to compress all of that into one essay, so I'm breaking it up into a multi-part series instead. It lets me give each topic the attention it deserves.

Here's how the series is structured:

Part I: A Brief History of Attention: We assume that attention is a single, simple thing - like a spotlight on an object, summoned at will. The companies know it's not. One of the advantages they have over us is understanding that attention is extremely complex, yet also in some ways really simple. That knowledge is how they stay ahead.

This part is meant to close that gap. It covers how our understanding of attention has evolved - from early philosophers describing it based on how it felt to neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists studying how it works.

Part II: A Brief History of Hijacking Attention: Although attention is often discussed in the context of social media and digital screens, this isn't the first time corporations and institutions have abused it. Mass media first made harvesting attention possible at scale in the 19th century. The basic method has not changed, but its sophistication and reach have. Recognizing that is the first step to breaking its spell.

Part III: What Happens When Attention is Hijacked: One of the interesting features of human nature is that we rarely act on information alone. We know smoking kills, and yet we smoke. We know sleep matters, and yet we scroll. Knowing isn't enough, it seems. We need to feel the stakes to make them real and actionable for us.

This part tries to do that. It looks at what is lost when attention is captured over time: what it does to our health, to our relationships, to the larger societal elements like democracy and collective decision-making, and, finally, to the sense of self.