Attention, Please!
"There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention." ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
On being “So Smrt.”
There is a phrase people have said to me since my earliest memories:
“You are so smart.”
My whole life, relatives have told me hetero-biographical1 stories about my smartness.
One time, as a child, upon seeing a (presumably) homeless woman holding a sign “ANYTHING HELPS” on the side of the road, I asked my mom “how can she afford the marker and cardboard for her sign?” As an adult, I can think of lots of ways she might have gotten these items for free and I also know that being homeless doesn’t preclude investing your limited resources in a marker and poster-board—but this early display of reasoning prowess, performed from a booster chair in the back-seat of the car, thoroughly impressed my mom. “You are so smart for asking that.”
I also had a ridiculous vocabulary for a child. Four-year-old-Me2 answered questions like “Do you want some milk?” with “Perhaps.”
Five-year-old-Me once used the word ‘ricochet’ in a sentence. That made my dad laugh, cause how would a five-year-old know that word? But when he laughed, I assumed I had used it incorrectly and spent decades of my life thinking the word ‘ricochet’ had some nuance I didn’t understand.
Six-year-old-Me read the abridged and illustrated Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, but Eight-year-old-Me read the unabridged version. Don’t worry, I’ve read it several more times since then—it’s one thing to understand the narrative of a book at eight years old, but the subtext is (literally) a whole ‘nother story.
Teenager-Me had the honor of watching my mom defend me to my sophomore English teacher during a parent-teacher conference. The teacher accused me of plagiarism.3 He said I couldn’t possibly understand the words I used in my essay—so my mom calmly informed him of my childhood reading habits, and suggested he be quiet.
I have anecdotes like these for dayyyys—each with a corresponding “you’re so smart,” either express or implied, from some person or another.
No, YOU are.
I have not always been humble about my smarts—why would I be, when other people are always telling me about it?—but ‘being smart’ has never felt special to me in any way. I take it for granted and I tend to operate as if everyone else is just as smart as I am. No matter how much life experience I gather, I can’t shake a deeply felt sense that everyone has an inherently equivalent capacity to understand reality.
And to me, capacity to understand reality = smart.
I believe this so deeply (like, bone deep, deeper than logic or thought) that sometimes it feels condescending when other people call me ‘smart.’ Like the feeling Little Alaina got when I asked my mom how the homeless woman got her sign materials, and, instead of saying “maybe she got them out of a dumpster,” my mom said “you are so smart for asking that.” I felt frustrated and confused. Why does that make me smart? My mom is smart too. Has she never wondered about this before? Has she never tried to figure it out? Why not? Why didn’t she answer my question? I don’t understand!
I don’t think it means what you think it means.
But what I am coming to realize—what I am coming to believe—is that what most people mean when they say “you are so smart” is actually “you pay so much attention.” Because, you see, that’s my superpower. Paying attention. Noticing. Like Sherlock Holmes. But, where Holmes is known for sharp logical deductions, my methods are fuzzy and contextual.
For example, the reason I could attempt reading the unabridged Picture of Dorian Gray at age eight is because I had already read the illustrated/abridged version at age six. The kid’s version provided a story framework upon which to hang the literary ornamentation of the grown-up version. I already knew the story, because I first read it using small words and big pictures. When I attempted the big-words-no-pictures version, I wasn’t starting from scratch and I didn’t need to understand everything. Like watching a familiar movie in an unfamiliar language—I still knew what was going on.
So it was with my advanced reading skills as a child—I didn’t understand what I was reading, but I was figuring it out as I went by paying attention to how the words in front of me related to the things I already knew about the story.
C'est la vie.
Attention is Life.
Literally everyone pays attention to some things, some times. I might even argue that the-paying-of-attention is, itself, what defines conscious experience. I speculate that each of our personal wells contain the same capacity for attention—or consciousness—but each well takes a unique shape and is filled in a unique way.
Some wells are deeply penetrating, but narrow and specialized. Some wells are shallow and vast, more like reservoirs, and contain whatever falls in. Some wells are painstakingly built from hand-carved stone, covered tightly, and heavily sanitized.
My personal well of attention is like a shallow aquifer seeping and surging just below the vast surface of an entire sandy planet, overflowing at every mildly precipitative event. Attention saturates my being and I routinely push myself to the absolute limit of my attentive capacity. This is what makes me seem smart—maybe it even makes me ‘be’ smart.
For me, paying attention is like breathing, but also sometimes like drowning—no matter how hard I try, no matter how focused my perspective, it is not possible for me to pay attention to everything that is happening all at once.
I find that devastating.
Optimize for Life.
Since I can’t pay attention to everything, the trick is knowing what to pay attention to and allowing the rest of reality to take care of itself. So how can I optimize for:
Given limited attention, to what/whom should I pay it?
I don’t know the answer, I have only just gotten to a place in my life where it occurs to me to ask the question. But I think this could be THE universal question; the one whose answer can provide a guiding light to anyone with the fortitude to investigate it for themselves.4
Maybe the answer, for each of us, will actually be a unique system or heuristic applicable only to the individual life from which it emerges. But I sure would like to figure out how to figure it out—and I’d like to share that secret meta-magic with every single person on Earth.
I want all of us to be optimizing for our own unique attentive capacities, so the things I can’t pay attention to are still noticed by someone. And the things You can’t pay attention to are still noticed by someone. And together, We will optimize the organic human system to which We all belong!
*euphoric flailing gestures*
But of course, there is a companion question that must not be ignored:
“Where am I currently spending my attention?”
Thank You for Being. Here.
I hope you found some resonance with this entry. If you feel curious, please read the introduction to my new series for paid subscribers: Personal Archaeology. I’m currently publishing a multi-part exhibit featuring a ‘zine I made when I was 17, called Infinizine.
All Infinizine exhibits will be freely available to all subscribers—but, as a thank-you to anyone choosing to place an early bet on Juxtaposition’s success, the subscription price will be at its lowest during this limited time.
Use the button below to upgrade your subscription for just $4.44/month or $44.44/year5 any time before I release Infinizine Part 4. That will be your price forever, as long as you don’t cancel.
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And as always, You can be read by me via email to juxtaposition@substack.com. I may not respond, but take a look at the “Commun(icat)ion” section of the About Page to find out why You should definitely still write to me.
Email me if you’d like to read the circular Chat GPT exchange wherein I was trying to find an opposite prefix for “auto” and it said “hetero” and I said “no” but ultimately I changed my mind and decided to go with it. It’s kind of a cool meta-example of using AI to change your own perspective on something.
All ages are approximate, but I’ve done my best to deduce my age at time of memory based on how long before/after parents’ divorce it occurred, grade level, my brother’s involvement and age, and realistic human development.
Thankfully, my English teacher for all three of the other high school years was a magnanimous educator who took me seriously in a way I desperately needed.
Maybe the answer will even turn out to be ‘42’ somehow…like the life task of each person is to find the 42 things they can most effectively pay attention to. Or maybe the wavelength of ‘attention’ turns out to be 42 units on some undiscovered scale. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Substack actually won’t let me set a price this low, so I had to add a percentage discount with a lot of decimal places and it’ll probably force it to round. It might end up being $4.43/month or $44.30/year, which is less satisfying but fine.