4kw Chapter 5
The theme this chapter is on our experience of attention.
More unsorted, undeveloped, and raw notes and thoughts from Four Thousand Weeks.
Notes
Attention is the experience of being alive - you pay for attention with the minutes of your life.
Variable reward is used to keep us pulling down for refresh. For checking our phones, inboxes, feeds, etc. I hate being manipulated. It takes a will, but batched delivery is much better for our brains.
The industry of the attention economy distorts our model of reality by bringing to our attention the things that we find most compelling. Our model of reality is just that, a model, and it's all we have for interacting with reality. It's assembled out of the things that we have attended to with our minds.
Non-engineered reality struggles to compete with the engineered meta-reality that the attention economy folks present to us. Actually, real reality is much richer, more subtle, so interactive and present, full of surprises. But you have to show up for it.
Focusing on this moment, no matter how unpleasant, can make it completely engrossing.
Boredom is the pressure of our finitude. Finitude is another word for our mortal limitation. I'll have to pay more attention, but this is not what my recollection of boredom is. I'm not even sure that I feel bored anymore; those times are an opportunity to notice what I notice.
Distraction just needs to make you feel unconstrained (contrasted with finite); it doesn't need to be fun.
Finitude is also another way of saying "this is it."