Philosopher, podcaster, and our producer Amelia Hruby, PhD returns to the show to discuss the many perils of the attention economy. We explore the nuanced relationships between attention and productivity, social media and mental health, and algorithms and agency. Amelia also shares her critiques of digital detoxes, flow states, all-or-nothing thinking, and short-form video. Behind the paywall, we discuss quantum listening, the political and social impacts of algorithms, generative AI, and an exclusive discount code for Amelia’s new book. Plus, Christy shares some big news: Amelia will be on the mic for more episodes starting next week!
The first half of this episode is available to everyone. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Amelia Hruby is a feminist writer, podcaster and producer with a PhD in philosophy from DePaul University. Over the past decade, she’s been a university professor, a community organizer, and a radio DJ. Now, she is the founder and executive producer of Softer Sounds podcast studio. Since leaving social media in April 2021, she’s also launched the popular podcast Off the Grid, where she interviews artists, writers, business leaders and former influencers. Amelia is a platform critic, an AI skeptic, and an advocate for a non-extractive internet. Her new book, Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media, is out now.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Amelia’s new book, Your Attention Is Sacred Except on Social Media
Amelia’s first appearance on the pod in 2023, plus her bonus episode
Amelia’s second appearance on the pod in 2025
Filterworld by Kyle Chayka
The AI Con by Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: My guest in this episode really needs no introduction at this point. She is the editor of this podcast, a now three time guest on the show, and she’s also the author of a new book called Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media, which we’re going to discuss today. And I am talking, of course, about the wonderful Amelia Hruby. Amelia, welcome.
Amelia Hruby: Hi, Christy. Thanks so much for having me on once again.
Christy Harrison: Yes, I’m so excited to talk with you once again. Before we dive into the meat of the conversation, I just want to let listeners know that they’ll be hearing a lot more from Amelia in the coming weeks and months because as I get ready to take my maternity leave, Amelia’s stepping into more of a producer role with the show, which is going to include recording the intros for the interview episodes so that I can just focus on banking as many interviews as possible and doing a million Q&As to get ahead. So starting next week, you’ll hear Amelia’s lovely voice at the beginning of every interview episode and I’m excited for that. Are you excited?
Amelia Hruby: I’m absolutely excited. I was fully prepared when we hit record to be like, hi, Christy, welcome to Rethinking Wellness.
Christy Harrison: Yes, already stepping into the role. I love it.
Amelia Hruby: Yes, listeners, you will start hearing me at the top of the episodes, telling you about what’s coming up, who Christy is speaking to and chiming in with any additions or addendums as needed. I am super excited to be here and doing this. And honestly, I’m really grateful to all of the paid subscribers of Rethinking Wellness who are making this possible and allowing Christy to take a maternity leave, providing the support for me to step in and keep these episode intros going. And I think I can speak for Christy as well and say that we’re just really have a ton of gratitude for your support.
Christy Harrison: Absolutely, yeah. It’s amazing. It’s really something I couldn’t have envisioned when I first started this podcast and this new platform. So super grateful to all the paid subscribers and super grateful to you too, Amelia, for being able to do this and step in because getting six months ahead with content is a mighty feat.
Amelia Hruby: It’s Herculean, for sure.
Christy Harrison: And to know also that I’m not recording something that might be outdated or in bad taste because of what’s going on in the world at the moment or whatever, that I know that there’s someone who could step in and move things around if needed or just give an intro that’s fresh, that’s not six months old or from whenever I recorded the episode is huge. So thank you.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I feel like we should do a whole episode in the future about just the behind the scenes of everything it takes to bring this show that people love to life. There is so much research that you do, so much reporting going on, and then, yeah, just so much staying on top of the news and what’s happening and feeling contextually and culturally relevant. It is a big effort to put out a podcast of this caliber. I’m honored to be behind the scenes. And we love doing it. That’s why we do it. We love it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of work.
Christy Harrison: Yes, totally. It’s a great job, but it is still quite a job. So I’m really excited for all of that. And I’m also excited to talk with you about your book today. It’s kind of a topic that first drew me to your work. It really is what I had you on the show to talk about for the first time, which is attention and social media and how the two are often at odds with each other.
You were first on the pod way back in 2023, and we talked then about your history with diet and wellness culture, as well as your experience leaving social and how the two sort of felt intertwined the similarities between social media and diet culture. So we’ll refer listeners to that episode to hear the full story. But just for the purposes of this conversation, I’d love to have you share briefly what was your experience with social media and what made you decide to leave the platforms ultimately?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah. So, like many millennials, I joined social media in high school, I got on Facebook. In college, I got on Instagram. And my profiles at first were pretty private and personal. But somewhere in my mid-20s, I started creating content for Instagram and I became a micro influencer. I did brand deals with Parade, the underwear company and Bando, and spent a lot of effort, energy and money trying to grow my platform. All of that kind of culminated in a book deal that I got for my first book, 50 Feminist Mantras, which came out in fall of 2020. And as that book came, I was just investing more time, money and energy than ever in Instagram.
And on the other side of my book launch, I just realized that it felt bad and it wasn’t working. And those two cues, combined with a newfound understanding of the ways that social media companies were surveilling us on the apps and then profiting from that surveillance that I didn’t even feel like I’d always consented to. Those kind of three things became this trifecta of reasons that I needed to leave. And so I left all social media platforms in the spring of 2021. And that was four and a half years ago now.
Christy Harrison: I’m so excited to talk with you about how your mental health and your relationship with your attention and everything has changed as a result of that. Because it’s truly amazing for someone to make that stand and commit to it and then follow through for this length of time. You don’t see that a lot, I think. There a lot more people now, I think, leaving social media and leaving it behind very fully.
But then there’s also people like me who, I mean, up until fairly recently, I was still on Instagram for work and I was having someone else post on my behalf. Now I’m off Instagram, but I still have the account. It’s just kind of dormant and I’m on Substack Notes and I just have a toe in the world still because it’s hard to really fully extricate myself. So I admire and I’m impressed by your commitment to leaving social media and your commitment to just like honoring your own mental health and wellbeing.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah. And I will also just add that I don’t think everyone has to leave social media and I’m never here to judge anyone’s decisions that they personally make around their social media use. I always like to kind of call in the sort of activists adage, be soft on the people, hard on the systems. And so I really like to critique social media from a more systemic standpoint and then be really like kind to myself and others as we navigate the realities of these platforms, which are so pervasive and so manipulative and also, for many of us, so connective and so even profitable for some people.
So there’s a lot of nuance here, and I’m grateful that you’re sharing how you’ve interacted with social media, Christy. Obviously, I’m kind of at one end of the spectrum, not being there at all, but I really welcome in listeners no matter what your social media use or interest is, I think there’s space to reflect more on it, and that’s what I like to help people do.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, and I think you do a really great job of that in the book. I feel like the question that you ask about, what is social media giving you or what are you getting out of it is really instructive. So let’s just start with why you decided to write this book. It’s called Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media, which I love. And, yeah, I’m just curious, you have a podcast, you teach courses about this stuff. Why a book at this point?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, so I have read most of the big social media critical books out there, and many of them are written by journalists. Many of them are written by men, particularly white cis men, which is great. I want a plethora of perspectives out there on this. However, as I read them, I never felt like I was seeing my experience of social media in those pages. And I also felt like they were all making this mistake that was really important to me, which is that everybody just started out with the premise of, like, we live in an attention economy, and it’s really hard, and your attention is scarce, and it’s fractured and it’s horrible, and social media is making it worse.
I wanted to back up a bunch of steps and be like, wait, what even is attention? What does it mean when we talk about it this way? And how could I write a book about social media that reflects my experience on these platforms. As a woman, as a former influencer, what would that look like? So that’s kind of what led me into writing this book.
Christy Harrison: I think that’s really powerful because it is an experience that we don’t see as often in these books, and that especially that framing of the attention economy, it is taken as such a given. And one of your arguments in the book is that the concept of the attention economy is actually unhelpful. Can you walk us through why?
Amelia Hruby: Something I say in the book is as a description of how attention is commodified on social media, I think the attention economy works, like that’s actually a good descriptor of what’s happening there, but I see people over and over and over again take that concept of the attention economy and use it as a universal truth about our attention and how it works in the world right now. That’s what I think is a mistake. I don’t think there aren’t relevant applications of this concept. I just don’t think it is the only way to understand attention.
In the book, I try to walk through what I think attention actually is, what economics actually is, and then why if we understand economics as the study of how scarce resources are distributed, which is a very common definition of economics, then by definition, our attention is always going to be scarce. Because if attention is an economic resource and economics study scarce resources, then we have this sort of logical puzzle of like, so attention must be scarce.
And I just, as a philosopher, felt like that logic was flawed or was kind of predeterminate of forcing our attention to be scarce. And that didn’t match my actual lived experience of my attention. Especially once I had gotten off of social media and once I had reclaimed and really healed a lot of the aspects of my attention, I realized it’s not scarce, it’s abundant. I have so much attention, I lose track of time. I focus on one thing so much sometimes and then a million things at once other times. And I saw attention as this creative, expansive, abundant resource, which made me start to see that, oh, this assumption that attention is scarce is perhaps a false assumption and I want to dig more into that.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I want to dig more into that too, because I think it’s really important. And something that has just clicked for me so much in reading your book is like, one of the ways that I work sometimes is I’ll block out days where I’m like, okay, this day I’m going to do this thing and I need to meet this deadline, or I’ll try to work ahead and like, get things done sooner than they need to be done.
But then I’ll find myself getting pulled down some rabbit hole and it’s not even through social media anymore. It’s not even necessarily through the news, although sometimes is. But it’s often like, oh, I have this personal project I need to take care of. I have to deal with something with finding a new school for my daughter or researching a health condition or whatever that I’m dealing with in a personal or whatever or now, pregnancy related stuff, dealing with that.
I’ll feel my attention getting pulled towards this thing and I’ll just be like a dog with a bone with it of like let me just get this figured out and whatever was on my agenda for the day just falls away. And I feel guilty about it a lot of the time or I have felt guilty about it but now I’m trying to look at it in this way of like, well this is what’s calling my attention right now. I am actually making a choice to give my attention to this thing because this feels more pressing. The other thing, yeah, it would be nice to get ahead or whatever but maybe also my brain needs a break. I do a lot of scientific, intense research and writing and sometimes doing a big piece like that, I’m just exhausted and I need a few days to mess around and do life admin or do some admin tasks for work that are not the same quality of attention but that still require my attention in a different way.
So I’m curious your thoughts on that, this idea of allowing your attention to go where it naturally goes and not to feel compelled to shut it down or constrain it in these ways that we sometimes feel compelled. And I recognize also that I have a lot of privilege in that because I have my own business, I make my own schedule, I can do this kind of thing. I don’t have a boss standing over me and being like where’s this report? So it’s different for everyone. But it’s just been interesting to me to take away some of the guilt and just sort of think about here’s where my attention is flowing and I’m gonna go with it.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah. Oh, I love so much of what you shared and I wanna pull out a few threads. So the first thing you mentioned around having these sort of blocks on your calendar. I think there is a relationship between attention and productivity here as well that I haven’t teased out yet. Because the other most common contemporary understanding of economics, one is the scarcity definition of economics. The second is GDP or gross domestic product. And so we have this idea of productivity tied into economics definitionally.
So when we are using an economic model, we are thinking of our attention as a productive resource and I think that leads us to a lot of these productivity tips, tricks and hacks like time blocking. And I don’t have anything against time blocking But I also think that it is quite the demand of our attention to be focused in these sort of deep work blocks of time that time blocking often suggests. And I have a footnote in the book that’s tangentially about this, where I talk about how I feel a little skeptical about some of the conversations around flow states, because I feel like many writers of attention in social media like myself, sort of posit that the antidote to fractured attention is flow states. And they’re like, well, you just gotta find flow. You just gotta get in flow. And here’s how we do that and all these things.
And I love a flow state. As a creative person myself, like, I love to interflow. But I don’t think that it is some epitome of attention or something like this. It’s just one mode of attention. And something else I liked about what you said, Christy, is you kind of mentioned these different qualities of attention. And I started talking about that since writing the book more as different textures for our attention. Because I think often when people think of the quality of attention, they think good or bad, high or low. Like, this is high quality attention. It’s a flow state. Super high quality attention. Or I’m multitasking, that’s super low quality attention. But I don’t think that’s true.
I’m not interested in ranking the styles of attention. I actually think that we need many different textures of attention. We need to be able to multitask in certain moments. That’s actually so magical that our brain can do that. I can breathe without thinking about it. Like my body is paying attention to that biological process without it having to be top of mind for me. And so I always want to uplift the many textures and types of attention. I don’t want to valorize any one particular one, whether that be a flow state or deep work. And I think in this way, my approach is also very neuroaffirming and very diversity affirming just in the sense of embracing that multiplicity without any assessment of value or quality.
Christy Harrison: Yes, absolutely. And I love what you said about our body being able to pay attention to things for us without us consciously paying attention. I’ve thought about that a lot in terms of eating, right? Intuitive eating being a way of allowing our bodies to pay attention to hunger and fullness and satisfaction and what they want and how much and when we’re wanting to eat without requiring conscious input from us or requiring the kind of attention that we are demanded to give it in diet culture and wellness culture because I think diet and wellness culture posit that you can’t be “healthy” or eating well, eating right, whatever it is, if you’re not paying a certain kind of attention, if you’re not giving this really intensive attention to everything you put in your mouth and when and timing it out and having it be this very structured, numeric, measured sort of thing.
The idea that your body can just do it itself, it can take charge of those things of like telling you what it wants or when and telling you when it’s hungry, when it’s had enough, that feels so radical, I think, to a lot of people who are used to this way of thinking about nutrition and food and our relationships with food as having to require this very top down sort of attention.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like that sort of diet culture mentality also gets applied to attention in a lot of the discourse around it because we talk about digital detoxes, these very restrictive methods for relating to our tech, that you should have time limits on it or you should be offline for a certain number of days a month or something like that. But I don’t have a restrictive or disciplinary method for reclaiming and healing your attention. I think the only way to do it is to actually follow that pleasure, to let your attention go the places it wants to go and perhaps to gently redirect it at times.
I think that’s another intervention I’m trying to make through this book is to remind all of us that that disciplinary sort of method that you and I had to unlearn through deconstructing diet culture and intuitive eating, we can’t just repeat it with our attention. We can’t just force our attention into these strict modes. And while I do recommend beginning to pay attention to your attention as a way of reclaiming it, that’s not meant to be an invocation for surveilling yourself. It’s meant to be an invitation to noticing what brings you pleasure and joy and moving more toward those things.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it’s such a positive and humane way of approaching it. I think about that a lot, like in terms of, I don’t know if I would have been able to step away from social media and sort of reframe or rethink my relationship with technology to the extent that I have been able to if I hadn’t already gone through that process of unlearning diet culture and starting to check in with myself about how things feel in my body and how I want to feel and sort of the difference between what’s going on and what I actually want.
There’s a quote from the book that I really love. You write, “The quality of our attention is inherent to the quality of our lives.” And I thought it was a really powerful idea, notwithstanding this discussion that we just had about quality. Maybe the word is texture or whatever but I can feel viscerally what you’re saying with that, which is like when my attention is fragmented and I’m just responding to notifications and reflexively checking my email and doing these sort of things that I’m just jumping to the whims of the algorithm and what it’s delivering me or whatever, I feel like my whole life feels fragmented. I don’t really feel whole. I don’t really feel in charge of my own mind. I feel just scattered in a million different directions and like my energy is dissipated, my creativity is dissipated.
When I’m intentionally choosing what to read, when I’m checking the things that I want to check without notifications turned on and things like that, when I’m deciding what to give my attention to, I feel much more together and much more whole, much more grounded and I’m taking care of my overall well being. And that’s not something that I read somewhere and was like, well, I have to do this because somebody told me. It’s not this like diet culture way.
It’s like a way that I really feel this in my body and have come to notice and recognize these things over years now of paying attention to my attention and has been a slow process of change of like sometimes I won’t catch myself until I’ve gone through a whole day where I’m just putting out fires, reflexively responding to things and then I’m like, oh, why do I feel so bad? And then I can sort of think about it more intentionally the next time maybe. It’s not always something I can catch in the moment, but it is really helpful to have these reminders to check in with how we feel when our attention is oriented one way or another.
Amelia Hruby: What you’re saying is reminding me of something else. I pull into the book, which is agency and I think that when we think of agency as acting intentionally when we are making choices for ourselves and they feel more internally driven, like we’re choosing them instead of someone else’s choosing them for us, I think having agency feels good. At least it feels good in my body. Making the choice myself feels so much more empowering than feeling like something is imposed upon me.
And I think that so often on social media we feel like we’re making a bunch of choices to keep doing things, but in fact, the user experience design of those platforms and the power of those algorithms is so strong that we don’t have agency there for very long. Not to mention all the addictive tendencies and the way that social media companies have poured millions and millions and millions of dollars into making their platforms more addictive so we do stay on them through gamification and all of these other methods. And I think that that’s rampant on social media.
But even when you step off the platforms, as you and I have to most extents, Christy, you can still feel it in other areas of your life. And I feel this every day when I sit down to work. And I also work for myself but if I go straight to my inbox and I just start responding to emails and I do that for hours, that doesn’t feel as good as if I go to my to do list and just do the first thing on there that I decided I wanted to do that day. Those are just different orientations to our attention. They’re different orientations to our agency.
And I think that in the world that we live in, we don’t have full, complete agency and autonomy, right? There are things we have to do. We all live under oppressive systems of varying kinds and we all have varying degrees of privilege based on our identity and social location. But that means that we don’t just get to do whatever we want most days, right? There are things we have to do.
And for me, what it really came down to is social media was not a thing I had to do. And so if I was spending all my time there and feeling drained by it, I was just handing over my attention, I was handing over my agency. And it took me a while to unpack the reasons I believed I had to be there and the trade offs I was making. But once I really saw it clearly, I was like, I don’t have to do this. I can opt out of this. I can’t opt out of having a Social Security number or paying my taxes. Well, I mean, I could but it would have detrimental effects for me. But I can opt out of social media. I just feel like there was this sort of belief in me that this was now compulsory and required, but it just wasn’t. And it feels so trite or simple to say that. But it really takes me, the whole book, to just kind of make that point of you don’t have to do this.
Christy Harrison: Right. Well, and it’s interesting you talk about, there are different reasons people are choosing to use social media or the reasons that feel the most compelling for people. And you said when you kind of surveyed people about this, the two camps that they would fall into were either they were looking for connection or they were looking for entertainment. And that the people who are looking for connection from social media seem to be more disappointed by what they find there and more frustrated with the experience and not really getting what they want or need.
And then the people who are looking for entertainment are maybe more generally satisfied with social media, although even then, looking to these algorithms for entertainment comes with its own problematic stuff. Can you talk a little bit about those reasons people might be gravitating towards social media and sort of what, the promises and pitfalls, I guess, of each of them?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll begin by saying, because I know your audience, that I am not a scientist and I did no scientific research for this book. So these are all anecdotal evidence that have come from over a hundred episodes of my podcast I’ve made and done interviews for, and many, many, many more conversations I’ve had with small business owners and artists and creatives about their social media use over the past almost five years now. So anecdotal, but I think, still powerful.
What I found when I really started to dig into this question of why are you using social media with people, is that many of the people I spoke to got on social media for these connective reasons. Many of them were millennials like myself. So they joined Facebook, which promised you a social network, quite literally. Or they joined Instagram, which promised you sort of connection to a wider, broader visual world that perhaps you didn’t have access to otherwise. But what they wanted was to make new friends, to make new connections, to meet new people, people. And I just hear over and over and over again that Facebook and Instagram specifically, and also Twitter really brought that to people in sort of the 2010s and they loved it.
Then something changed. And what changed was the motives of the social media companies and their need to start making a profit and not just provide cool, free connective spaces for people to hang out online. And so we saw the shift on Instagram from a chronological feed to an algorithmically curated feed. And I think that, for me becomes the sort of major turning point, or at least indicative of this big turning point where social media is no longer for connection, and it’s not providing connection with people you know or want to know. Instead, it’s providing paying brands access to the users on social media platforms. The logic and the desires and the motivations of the people who own the platforms changed, and as a result, the user’s experience has changed.
So now when I talk to people about social media, so often, they’re just like, this is what it used to do but now I go look at memes, I go look at cat videos, I scroll on TikTok for hours and I look at the dances, or it shows me these things that I never even knew you could do or I’m on Clean Talk, or I’m on Beauty Talk, or all of this sort of different phrasings. I’m on Book Talk. I think that now people are there for entertainment. They want that sort of pleasure and enjoyment of being surprised, delighted and satisfied. And I think that social media platforms, especially TikTok, are very good at providing that.
Part of what they do that makes it feel connective is you can get a sense of belonging by looking at these videos. You can feel like, oh, I’m like a part of Book Talk, perhaps, because I watch the creators and I know what’s going on and all of these things. So they sort of have this hit of I’m entertained. I feel a sense of belonging here.
But what I also always hear from people is then when they put their phone down, eventually, perhaps after hours of scrolling, none of those positive feelings remain. There’s this sort of sense of dissatisfaction that comes in because they realize that, like, oh, well, I don’t actually know this person. They don’t know me. I can’t actually speak to them. I actually have no contact with them except maybe in a comment or something like that. And so I think people have seen through the illusion that social media is meaningfully connecting them to other people. But there’s still a lot wrapped up in the illusion of we’re being entertained online.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Because entertainment is not just entertainment, necessarily and especially the way that these algorithms sort of continue to feed you more and more of what you seem to gravitate towards. It’s using your entertainment or your delight or whatever to push more and sell you more products and keep you scrolling. You talked about in the book this experience of like going to TikTok to be entertained and feeling like for the first couple videos or whatever, you really were, you were getting this like surprise and delight out of it. And then as you scrolled further, it just deadened and you just felt like there just wasn’t the same which feels a little bit like, like drug use. This is a way that we all relate to these things, right? The initial hit, it takes more to get that the next time or whatever.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I think it definitely maps onto a lot of the literature around addiction. I’ve read some very, very preliminary, probably not worth citing, studies that affirm my experience and have found that when you’re scrolling you might remember the first few things you see. But if you scroll for an hour and then you put your phone down and someone asks you what you saw, many people don’t remember any of it. They couldn’t name the specificity of one thing that they saw.
I think that shows us what’s happening to our attention as we spend more and more time scrolling. There’s a very specific texture of attention on social media that comes through the scroll. And I feel like with the sort of advanced behavioral manipulation of these platforms, like at a certain point we think that we’re controlling the scroll, but the scroll is really controlling us.
And as you’ve said, and as I say in the book, the purpose of them offering this entertainment, this pleasure, even the sense of belonging, the social media companies are trying to get us to buy things because that is how they make money. And even I’m thinking now, when I name those different communities on TikTok earlier, CleanTalk, Beauty Talk, Book Talk, they are all product based, they are all trying to get you to buy cleaning products, beauty products and books. And so we really see the motivation here is to get you to make a purchase and any enjoyment you get on the way to that is a side effect of social media. It’s not what they’re actually trying to provide for you.
Christy Harrison: Or it’s an instrument to get you to stick around and buy or maybe to make you feel good and have good feelings towards the creators of the product that that’s being placed in front of you or the creator who is showing you the product, that’s their affiliate or whatever it is. It’s not sort of an altruistic motive to get us to feel good or be entertained.
Amelia Hruby: Social media is now just a big mall. It’s essentially just an Amazon website where instead of seeing the different products first, you see people using the products first and then you by them. It’s all so integrated and it’s so insidious.
Christy Harrison: Right. Whereas Amazon, it’s flipped, where you have to look into the reviews, and you will often find videos people made of themselves using the products, trying to become product influencers. Or maybe they are already product influencers, which is such an interesting, weird thing. But maybe we can put a pin in that, because there’s something I really want to discuss, which is this argument that while attention feels like a scarce resource to many of us, you don’t think it actually is, and that there are so many ways to expand your attention pool, maybe.
I loved your discussion about the relationship between attention and time through the work of the composer Pauline Oliveros. Can you explain her concepts of deep listening and quantum listening? And I will just note that for me and many other critics of wellness culture, the word quantum is often a huge red flag, that there’s some wellness nonsense afoot. But that’s not the case with quantum listening. That’s not what’s going on here. This is, I think, a really cool concept.
Amelia Hruby: Yes, thank you for flagging that. I don’t have that reference point so I’m always just like, yeah, quantum physics, obviously, it’s science, which is slightly different.
