The Pursuit of Attention

In 2019, the pursuit of happiness has become a pursuit of attention. You may have food and clothes, a good health, a house with a garden and some security. If you feel like you don’t receive or ‘deserve’ attention, you will be unhappy. In this time of Beschleunigung and Social Web Addiction, when everybody chases his self-defined goals at 120 km/h and 10Mbit/s, attention has become the most pursued good, the holy grail of happiness.

In the world of politics and media, attention makes and breaks careers. In the world of work, companies no longer need hard-working people or smart people, they need people who spend all their attention to work and it has become a challenge to identify the ones who do. In education, the children have not become lazier or more rebellious, it just has become increasingly difficult to attract their attention, due to the thousands of stimuli and opportunities they need to process each day. We see a lot of kids that are of good will, but they are dropping out because of a lack of attention from their parents and their teachers.

Relationships between friends, partners, parents and children can only be nurtured through mutual attention. Attention is love and love is attention. But attention requires time and energy, so we have to get our priorities right! With this blog, I once again show I’m good in theory. Practice in family life however proves that “we” usually fail towards the ones we love most. It is rare that one regrets not having answered a remark from a remote Facebook friend. After answering a thousand remarks from remote Facebook friends however, we may regret not having paid attention to our partner, our children or our parents. And finally, it can even happen that we don’t pay enough attention to ourselves.

A special kind of paying attention is attentiveness, a very useful virtue in social life. I also refer to my blog: You are your Time

Picture: zijkant Beursgebouw Brussel ©Wim Lahaye