“We are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to — that is, what to value. In the absence of strongly-held answers to this question our attention remains adrift and unclaimed — we cannot, therefore, be surprised that app-peddlers and sticky websites swooped in to aggressively feast on this abundant resource.“

“From the 1960s onwards there has been this great expansion of personal autonomy – the liberalisation of divorce laws, all manner of ways in which we have been liberated from constraints on our behaviour.” A world of constant choice means that our powers of self-control are heavily taxed.”

[…] “The idea that you yourself can be the source of the norms by which you justify yourself”—the “cult of sincerity”—has made genuine relationships well-nigh impossible by making “individuality” a product of strictly internal processes. 
[…] It follows that freedom depends on standards of truth not present in an independently existing world out there but in our own minds, which mediate between self and world through “representations”; to know becomes really a matter of knowing our own minds. And since “attention is the faculty through which we encounter the world directly,” as we have retreated from the world, the role of attention has diminished. “

One element of our predicament is that we engage less than we once did in everyday activities that structure our attention.[..] The activities that I have in mind are skilled practices [like cooking an elaborate meal]. Such practices locate the possible answers to the question ‘What is to be done next?’ outside our own heads, in our relations to objects and to other people. They establish narrow and highly structured patterns of attention – which I call ecologies of attention – that can give coherence to our mental lives, however briefly. 

In such an ecology, the perception of a skilled practitioner is “tuned” to the features of the environment that are pertinent to effective action; extraneous information is dampened and irrelevant courses of action disappear. As a result, choice is simplified and momentum builds. Action becomes unimpeded. 

The ancient insight that human beings are, fundamentally, erotic beings, beings who long to transcend their own boundaries, has been denied by our philosophy of autonomy, which is a philosophy of radical self-sufficiency. By recognizing our erotic nature, the world becomes available to us again because we allow ourselves to be drawn to it. Attention is erotic by nature. 

[…] genuine agency arises not in the context of mere choices freely made (as in shopping) but rather, somewhat paradoxically, in the context of submission to things that have their own intractable ways, whether the thing may a musical instrument, a garden, or the building of a bridge.

When you exist outside of such ecologies, by contrast, you lose this agency and your world is instead shaped for you by other, often mechanistic means — be it Facebook’s newsfeed or the algorithm Niantic Labs deploys to locate Pokemon on your block.