I remember, as a little girl, watching my mom as she wiped down the counters for the hundredth time and mechanically loaded the dishwasher. I sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, waiting patiently for her to finish.
I wore pigtails and a bright pink outfit and, to me, my mom was the world. When she noticed me, she paused. To my delight, she read my mind and said in her energetic, warm voice, “I think you need attention.”
I did. We all do. I can’t remember if we baked a cake or if we played a game next, but I remember that moment, among so many others, as one of connection and love.
The substance of love
Simone Weil, a French philosopher, wrote that the love of God and our love for our neighbors has “attention for its substance.” A loving relationship simply cannot exist without true attention being both given and received.
When it comes to counting the true cost of succumbing to this age of distraction, we have to widen our aperture. This is not only about the shrinking of individual attention spans, wasted time or the consumption of junk entertainment.
The price of distraction is truly tallied by the moments of precious connection with others that we let slip away.
Choosing attention
Attention is an exclusionary act. For my mom to pay me attention, she had to turn away from a thousand other things calling for her attention.
So, where is our attention and simultaneously our love, increasingly directed in this modern age?
The simple answer is: not to those around us.
For most of human history, people’s immediate surroundings and immediate circles of friends and family naturally demanded the larger share of their attention.
Quiet moments left room for deeper reflection and introspection.
Widening circles, shrinking connections
A short stroll across a college campus is enough to illustrate how different our present situation is. I can’t count how many times I’ve been excited to see a good friend, only to have them rush to pull out an AirPod and distractedly say hello before stuffing the AirPod back in their ear.
Perhaps they’re listening to an enlightening podcast that’s worthy of real attention. Maybe that friend constantly checking their phone really does have time-sensitive texts to respond to or a breaking news story personally gripping to them for some reason.
Your attention is the most valuable gift you can give because it is the gift that only you can give.
The danger doesn’t always lie in the quality of the distractions but in their enormous quantity.
Even as our world vision has seemingly expanded, so many of us are simultaneously experiencing a shrinking awareness of our own communities, families and neighborhoods. In their report, “Stress in America 2025: A crisis of connection,” the American Psychological Association reports that 54% of U.S. adults say they have felt “isolated from others” and 50% have “lacked companionship.”
How often do we put down our distractions, our entertainment or even our pursuit of needless information in favor of the person right in front of us? As our attention is so often drawn away toward things beyond our stewardship and influence, this is the real tragedy: the people immediately around us go neglected.
William James once wrote that “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”
This renowned 19th-century psychologist claims that this is the virtue that allows us to be compos sui, or master of ourselves.
Your irreplaceable gift
Christian believers can appreciate how Christ noticed the seemingly insignificant and invisible with attention that became palpable love. For instance, Jesus noticed the suffering woman who reached for his garment enough to stop. He saw and stopped to heal the leper by the pool of Bethesda who had been neglected by others. And he protected the woman accused of adultery as a beloved sister — seeing her in a way that no one else did.
The first step of Christlike love may well be to always see — really see — the person in need of attention, the person in need of love.
If we want to be reliable, loving friends in the lives of those around us, we will have to consciously choose to direct our attention toward what is most important.
Alternatively, if we fail to take our attention into our own hands and treat it as a precious and personal stewardship, we will be at the mercy of intelligent technology that knows how to manipulate our attention. We will become the objects, rather than the agents, of technology.
As machines become more capable of performing what was once human labor, attention will become even more the most valuable commodity. Hopefully, we will begin to recognize that raw intelligence or efficiency is not the most valuable gift we can offer. Attention, the currency of love, is often the much more needed gift.
Artificial intelligence can mimic this gift of attention but never truly produce it. It is not and never can be the answer to the countless people starving for connection in a distracted world. Only we, with human souls and human hearts, can offer the kind of attention that develops lasting relationships and heals neglected, waiting hearts.
Your attention is the most valuable gift you can give because it is the gift that only you can give.