Reclaiming Our Attention From “Convenience”

Technology both saves and eats up our time. Beyond the digital detoxes and “dumbphones,” reckoning with our tech habits is as simple as returning to our breath.

When it became possible, in the early ’80s, to migrate from writing on a typewriter to word processing, it was a revelation. Prior to that, if correcting a mistake carried a line over to the next page, you retyped the whole thing! I can’t believe that’s how we worked. 

I was not an early cell phone adopter, but before long it made business and social arrangements unavoidably more convenient. In the past, if you were late and needed to let someone know, you had to find a pay phone, dig around for the right change, find the number of the place you expected them to be, and hope the line wasn’t busy and the person answering could find your friend. Now, a quick text and presto. Thumbs up emoji. 

In less than 50 years, how we do nearly everything has been transformed. For many it’s made the world massively more convenient. Yet, as deeply appreciative as I’ve been for the devices that have vastly changed how we work and play, it has begun to feel that the convenience has introduced a lot of inconvenience. It’s not just the challenge of navigating the galloping complexity of the digital landscape or the many inconveniences that come from the need to install “upgrades” that add new features you never needed and can’t figure out how to use. 

Something deeper is at play that goes beyond curmudgeonly gripes. 

A bit of mindfulness practice may be the very thing we need to help us reclaim some ownership of our own attention and state of mind.

Convenience is about saving time, but the digital world is now just as often an enormous time suck. Not just the time devoted to needless updating, but all the time dragged down social media rabbit holes. The attention economy is astoundingly clever at capturing our most precious resource: what we pay attention to. As the movie The Social Dilemma pointed out, we’re often unwittingly letting our attention be manipulated and stolen, sleepwalking into traps laid for us by master emotional manipulators. 

Greek philosophy celebrated techne, the drive to make things—whether it’s shoes or bicycles, musical instruments, or works of art. It’s a part of who we are that we’ll never be free of. Nor should we. It brings great gifts, like movable type, the typewriter, the word processor, the text message (and the hammer and nail for that matter). But it also rules our lives in ways we may not have consciously chosen. 

A time of reckoning accompanies all technologies. Just as climate change has caused us to rethink how we make and consume, it’s also past time to reckon with our habits around digital devices and “conveniences.” To take some agency back. And a bit of mindfulness practice may be the very thing we need to help us reclaim some ownership of our own attention and state of mind. One potent example comes to mind. Like a car, the mind and brain have an idle rate, and I’ve noticed that my idle has been inching higher, as the expectation of immediacy offered in the digital realm—instant messaging, instant entertainment, instant answers from a search engine—has taken hold. I’m engaging with a less reflective, contemplative spirit, more inclined to rush forward than to take time. In short, I’m less mindful of what I’m doing and its implications.

Fortunately, a simple practice like attention to the breath interrupts that forward lurch and invites us to settle back into our bodies and the wonder and awe of our senses. From that place, we can take full ownership of our attention, instead of giving it over to our phone, tablet, laptop, newsfeed—no matter how apparently convenient. It doesn’t matter how much time we’re saving, if we’ve lost our sense of who we are and where we’re going.