I think it was a bit of a sleight of hand to make it about time. Because time is quantifiable. You can give 5 minutes of your time but I figure most people can attest that has little to do with how much actual attention you’re giving. And it’s attention that we crave. That’s what social media is built upon. When you really love and enjoy something or someone, you’re thinking of it, even if you’re not actively engaged with it. And on the other hand, if you give something attention for long enough, you do start to develop some kind of an attachment on it ( which easily becomes unhealthy too, like doom scrolling ).
Time I have, energy… no.
Attention is a function of dopamine & serotonin production over time.
Almost everything about being human reduces down to a handful of neurotransmitters.
Those neurotransmitters just release electrical impulses so if you want to break it down everything about humans reduces down to electricity traveling through out meat
Yes, but the key detail is governance. There’s specific molecules that, without them, there is no attention to be sought. Paying attention or “having willpower” is causally linked to these specific compounds being present in the meat.
Much of “free will” boils down to regulation of these neurotransmitters.
No.
And what are neurotransmitters?
Children are little attention vampires, no matter how much do you give, they will always want more.
That said, fucking phones always in our hands are a disrespect to them, so while I don’t give a lot of attention, mine is 100% pure*.
*Terms and agreements might apply.
Attention isn’t always good, being followed around by a person who can’t pick up social cues who wants to give you all of their attention doesn’t feel good
A girl who wants to hang out with her friends being given unwanted attention by men doesn’t feel good
If I am driving down the road and a cop decides to give me his attention which in the process of, takes away my time and money I am surely going to be upset
Time matters because it’s a limited resource, someone giving you their time means that they have decided to give some of that limited resources to you. It doesn’t always need to be in the form of attention, if I hire a maid and they save me 2 hours of time I don’t need them to sit there and give me attention
Attention isn’t always good, being followed around by a person who can’t pick up social cues who wants to give you all of their attention doesn’t feel good
Actually this is kinda what I was thinking when I wrote the last bit. I was specifically thinking about ASMR and how ASMRtists are at risk for unhealthy attention and attachments from people who look at them for hours and hours. However it’s a bit besides my point. Your attention remains valuable to you (one hopes) but obviously unwanted attention is… well, unwanted. There’s a big tangent of course on if someone giving unwanted attention to someone else is really giving their attention to that person, or are they giving their attention to their personal, subjective idea about that person (I’d argue the latter, because I prefer to give attention as a concept a somewhat virtuous vibe - because I want to encourage people to value their attention).
Time matters because it’s a limited resource
So is attention. We can multitask to some degree but sooner or later the plates will start falling. But as I said, you can put a number on time but you can’t give 3.5 attentions to something. For the human mind it’s easier to grasp the idea of “giving time” because you can measure, compare and contrast it*. Attention just is, and it’s extremely subjective specifically because in daily life it’s very hard to know if someone is objectively giving their full attention to something or are they just physically present while engaging with something entirely different in their mind.
Edit: Important of course to note that we can only measure time because we developed a system for it. “10 minutes” doesn’t exist in reality. There’s just things that we observed to behave in certain, predictable ways and we built systems to represent the behavior, like the idea of the 24h clock.
Time is happiness. You can win a lottery and become a millionaire overnight. You cannot buy more time on this earth even with all the money in the world.
Attention is what helps achieve happiness with your time.
The world is illiterate 🥲
To give someone time is to give them your attention
No, I don’t think so. You can be physically present somewhere while your attention is in whatever is going on in your head. Though I grant you that in that case you’re not doing either very well.
Then you aren’t giving them your time
Get it?
“Seat time” is literally what you are giving them in that situation. You can say that it’s not “time” but I can say that it is because there is nuance and we are doing many things at same time. Being present physically, mentally, paying attention to your surroundings, putting in effort, etc, can in many ways be counted separately. Who’s to say if your way of accounting for time is the “correct” one or whether somebody else’s is?
Sure but then you are the one specifically saying it’s “seat” time which is an overt signal it’s not “real” time
If you just said an unqualified time it’s rightfully assumed to be your legitimate attention
Eh, I see what you mean but I think in this culture and point in time, it’s useful for human well-being to see them as separate things. Like I said, conflating them is a sleight of hand. Because the reality is that you can book 1h for a meeting and then be totally mentally absent from it. People think that you’re committed in the meeting, you’re giving it your time as can be measured. You are not actually giving your time to the meeting but due to being physically present, you’re also not using your time (and attention) freely on what you really want to. So you’re doing a sleight of hand possibly on yourself and people observing you in the meeting.
The sleight of hand is being committed by you and your work-culture problem
Tbh this sounds like a kinda personal issue you have with work and working too much or having a shitty job or something and it’s somehow morphing into a linguistic dispute instead when it shouldn’t be
Are you a boss at work of some kind? Maybe your perspective is tied up with some problem you have with your work culture. People are just complicating things when this is actually just so simple, right?
I’m actually your boss and very disappointed
I wrote very broadly (on purpose). Never defined the nature of the meeting. What your mind says about me has little to do with my life.
You’re the one who wrote a paragraph about how work meetings suck lol
work
Lots of psychoanalysis in this thread.
New to the Internet?
No, but it seems unusually aggressive for very little reason.
Then why are they still paying me for it?
They don’t have the ai technology implanted into your brain yet to only clock moments actually spent working
And it’s attention that we crave
You.
You crave attention, lots of people don’t
You shouldn’t assume everyone else thinks like you and is built like you, it’s never true and a sign of low empathy.
Fix that and you’ll get more attention and won’t crave it so much.
The attention economy is definitely a thing that corporations are very interested in, I think you’ve missed the overall point of OP’s post in your righteous zeal.
Yes…
Advertisers want you to pay attention to ads…
Unless OP is a corporation trying to get people to buy things, I don’t see the connection besides the word “attention”.
But I don’t think I’m gonna be able to help you understand that if that didn’t work
funny how you make a pretty inflammatory post that’s totally uncalled for and say op lacks empathy. and also imply you don’t want attention.
lol this reads exactly like some kid saying “LOOK HOW I DON’T CARE, LOOK HOW LITTLE I CARE, LOOK AT ME FOR NOT CARING AT ALL, I’M TOTALLY BEYOND CARING” xDDD
