In The Shock of the New, art critic Robert Hughes described the enormous perceptual disruption that accompanied modern life. Industrialization, mechanized transportation, photography, cinema, advertising, mass communication and the modern city didn’t merely change what people did. They changed the texture and pace of human experience itself.
There had been, comparatively speaking, an age of the singular experience.
This doesn’t mean people once possessed perfectly tranquil minds. Human beings have always worried, fantasized, remembered, anticipated and distracted themselves. But the external environment wasn’t yet capable of making continual competing demands upon attention.
You could eat dinner and, for the most part, simply eat dinner. You could walk somewhere without simultaneously receiving messages from six people, breaking news from three continents, advertisements selected specifically for you, photographs from acquaintances you haven’t seen in twenty years, political outrage, financial alerts, entertainment recommendations and an invitation to watch a video of a raccoon stealing someone’s DoorDash order.
Modernity began changing that. Digital life put it on steroids.
In a remarkable interview recorded in 1998, Terence McKenna was asked what he meant when he claimed that time was speeding up. His interviewer reasonably pointed out that clocks weren’t accelerating. The Earth wasn’t rotating faster. Our familiar measurements of time remained perfectly intact.
McKenna’s answer was essentially that he wasn’t talking about clocks at all.
More and more is happening.
He asked which seems longer: a million years in which nothing happens, or ten seconds containing fifty thousand events?
Whatever one thinks of McKenna’s more extraordinary metaphysical ideas—and there are plenty of them—this observation has aged remarkably well. He was describing something closer to event density than the acceleration of time itself.
Consider what has happened since he made that observation. In 1998, Google had just been founded. There were no smartphones, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X, TikTok or ChatGPT. Most people didn’t carry a permanently connected computer in their pocket, and algorithms weren’t continuously studying billions of people to determine what was most likely to capture and retain their attention.
Today, before getting out of bed, a person can encounter a war, an election controversy, a scientific discovery, a celebrity scandal, an economic crisis, a friend’s vacation, a stranger’s nervous breakdown, twelve messages, three advertisements and an artificial intelligence capable of discussing all of them.
The clock hasn’t changed. The amount of psychologically consequential information occupying the clock has.
And this changes more than our experience of time.
There is an important difference between information existing and information becoming part of your experience. Something first has to get your attention. Once it does, however, your mind begins doing something with it. You may make pictures, hear internal dialogue, anticipate consequences, remember related experiences, produce emotional and physiological responses, and assign meaning to what you’ve encountered.
The headline isn’t merely a headline anymore. You have begun constructing an experience around it.
Now multiply that process by the staggering number of things competing for your attention every day, many of them deliberately engineered to do exactly that. An enormous amount of money and technological sophistication is devoted to determining what will make you look, what will make you keep looking, what will bring you back, and what will make you angry, frightened, curious, envious or excited enough to continue.
This is why I often say focus is a superpower, especially in an environment increasingly skilled at managing it for you.
The modern attention economy doesn’t simply provide information. Much of it competes for the opportunity to participate in the construction of your subjective experience.
But the competition isn’t exclusively external. Long before algorithms learned to capture attention, fear could do it. So could memory, expectation, habit, desire and the associations we’ve accumulated over a lifetime. The outside world provides an unprecedented number of things to attend to, while the mind brings its own history to deciding what becomes salient and what all of it means.
That becomes particularly important when the sheer amount of incoming information exceeds what we can consciously process.
In my own work, I’ve long been interested in what happens under conditions of overwhelm. Overload can create conditions highly conducive to hypnotic responding: attention becomes increasingly selective, reflective processing can diminish, and automatic processes become more influential.
This doesn’t mean an overwhelmed person becomes a blank slate waiting for someone to “program” them. Quite the opposite. When we cannot consciously process everything confronting us, we become increasingly dependent upon selection, omission, generalization, previous associations, expectations and familiar patterns. The nervous system has to create a manageable experience from an unmanageable quantity of available information.
Seen this way, McKenna’s observation raises a rather interesting psychological question. What happens when “more and more is happening” than a human nervous system can consciously accommodate?
Our conscious bandwidth doesn’t simply expand without limit. Something gets selected. Something gets ignored. Something gets interpreted according to what we already believe, expect, fear or value.
The problem with modern information overload, then, isn’t merely that it can make us distracted or stressed. It can make us less conscious of how our experience is being constructed at precisely the time when more forces are competing to construct it. Attention begins to look less like a productivity concern and more like a question of agency.
Think about listening to a piece of music—not listening while answering a text or scrolling through photographs, but actually listening. Or sitting across from someone you love and having a conversation without periodically disappearing into a device. Walking without consuming anything. Reading without checking something else. Looking at something beautiful without immediately converting the experience into content.
From the outside, the person doing one thing may appear to be accomplishing less than the person doing five things simultaneously. Experientially, something very different may be happening.
An uninterrupted experience has room to develop. Sensory detail can deepen, associations can emerge, emotional responses can unfold, and memory can consolidate around something richer than another item passing through a stream.
Which creates one of the strangest paradoxes of contemporary life:
More happened. Less was experienced.
A week can contain an astonishing quantity of activity and nevertheless feel strangely insubstantial in retrospect. We were present for all of it chronologically, perhaps, but fully present for very little of it experientially.
Recovering the singular experience doesn’t require abandoning technology or pretending we can return to some romanticized earlier age. I wouldn’t want to. It requires becoming more deliberate about what gets access to us, and that turns out to involve much more than silencing notifications.
Urgency, importance and other people’s priorities
Stephen Covey’s familiar four-quadrant model distinguishes between what is important and what is merely urgent. Quadrant III contains the latter: things that demand attention without necessarily deserving it.
A great deal of modern life lives there, but there’s a psychological dimension of Quadrant III that doesn’t receive nearly enough attention: people-pleasing.
Something can feel important simply because somebody else wants something from us now. Their request may genuinely be urgent. Their disappointment may be real. Their expectation may be perfectly sincere. None of those things automatically makes the demand important according to our own priorities.
This is where focus begins requiring more than concentration. It requires boundaries, because if someone else’s urgency reliably overrides what you’ve already determined matters, you’ve effectively trained your environment how to control your attention. Sometimes the demand on our attention comes from a device; sometimes it comes from another person.
And sometimes protecting your attention requires the courage to be disliked: to be unavailable, to decline an invitation, to not respond immediately, to refrain from participating in every controversy, or to let someone misunderstand your priorities without immediately abandoning those priorities in order to manage their reaction.
This isn’t an argument for becoming indifferent to other people. Caring deeply about others may itself be one of your highest priorities. The question is whether you’ve consciously chosen to give something your attention in this moment, or whether somebody else’s urgency has made that decision for you.
Covey’s distinction therefore leaves us with a problem that a time-management matrix alone cannot solve: How do you know what’s important, and by what criteria?
If focus means deliberately selecting where a finite resource called attention will go, then selection requires criteria. This is why becoming conscious of your values—your higher organizing criteria—can dramatically increase your ability to focus. Once you know what genuinely matters to you, competing demands have something to be measured against.
Does this serve something I value? Is this where I want my finite attention going? Is what feels urgent actually important? Am I saying yes because this serves something meaningful to me, or because I’m uncomfortable with what might happen if I say no?
Seen this way, focus is not merely the ability to concentrate. It is the behavioral enforcement of a hierarchy of values.
And boundaries begin to look different as well. A meaningful no isn’t simply a rejection. Very often it protects something to which you’ve already said a more important yes.
Of course, this assumes that we’re conscious of the values influencing us.
We’re not always.
Someone may consciously know what matters and still repeatedly behave in ways that seem to undermine it. We call this procrastination, avoidance, lack of discipline or self-sabotage, but those labels don’t necessarily tell us much about why the behavior exists.
In change work, there’s a concept sometimes called secondary gain. An apparently unwanted behavior may simultaneously accomplish something the person values, often outside conscious awareness.
Someone consciously wants greater visibility but repeatedly avoids opportunities to become visible. Remaining unseen might preserve safety, belonging, humility, freedom, protection from judgment or something else entirely. Someone wants success but repeatedly withdraws as success approaches because some aspect of what success represents conflicts with another important criterion.
The particular answer varies enormously from person to person, which is why assuming the answer is usually a mistake. Instead, we can become curious about the behavior rather than immediately declaring war on it. What does it provide? What does it prevent? What might be lost if it simply disappeared? What’s important about that?
Sometimes what appears to be an enemy is an extraordinarily loyal employee with an outdated job description.
Rather than trying to overpower it with more discipline, we can discover what it has been attempting to accomplish and find a better way to fulfill that purpose.
Follow those questions far enough and sometimes what looked like a failure of focus reveals itself as a conflict between values.
Holding the flashlight
I often use the metaphor of a flashlight when talking about attention. At any moment, there is an enormous amount of information available to us, internally and externally. We cannot illuminate all of it simultaneously. Wherever we point the flashlight, certain things become vivid while others recede.
The modern world has made the room unimaginably larger, and much of what now occupies that room has become extraordinarily skilled at grabbing the flashlight.
The solution isn’t somehow learning to illuminate everything. We can’t. Instead, we can become better at noticing when something has captured our attention and curious about what we’re constructing from it. We can become clearer about the values by which we decide what deserves illumination, while learning to recognize when an old fear, association, unconscious criterion or someone else’s urgency is quietly pulling us elsewhere.
It also means establishing boundaries around what matters and becoming willing, occasionally, to disappoint people who would prefer that we point the flashlight toward them.
The world is unlikely to become less stimulating. Artificial intelligence alone suggests that the amount of information, novelty and complexity available to us is about to increase in ways we are only beginning to understand. McKenna may have been right about at least this much: more and more is happening.
We don’t have to experience all of it.
Perhaps one of the great psychological freedoms available to us now is recovering the ability to have an experience completely—to allow a conversation, a piece of music, an idea, another person, a moment of beauty or simply our own thoughts enough uninterrupted space to become something.
The more the world competes for your attention, the more important it becomes to know what matters to you. Focus, in the end, isn’t merely concentration.
It’s choosing what gets the flashlight.
