Simone Weil, the French philosopher who died in 1943, wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She meant something specific by this. Attention, for Weil, wasn't just focus. It was a kind of waiting, an openness, a willingness to let something other than yourself fill your awareness. To pay attention to another person was to suspend your own needs long enough to actually see them. This was, she believed, the foundation of love.

The phrase "pay attention" is more accurate than we usually realize. Attention is a currency. You spend it. And like any currency, it can be stolen, wasted, or invested. The question is where it goes.

The attention economy is built on capturing this currency and converting it into something else: engagement metrics, advertising revenue, behavioral data. The apps on your phone are not neutral tools. They are designed by people whose job is to take your attention and hold it as long as possible. Every notification, every infinite scroll, every autoplay video is an extraction mechanism. You are not the customer. You are the product, and the product is your attention, sold to the highest bidder.

This would matter less if attention were infinite. But it isn't. Attention is zero-sum. The hour you spend scrolling is an hour you didn't spend reading, or thinking, or talking to someone in the room with you. The attention captured by your phone is attention withdrawn from everything else. And because the phone is always there, always ready to fill any gap, the everything else keeps shrinking.

Weil would have recognized this as a spiritual problem, not just a practical one. For her, attention was the mechanism by which we encounter reality. To attend to something fully was to let it exist for you, to grant it the weight of your awareness. Distraction, by contrast, was a kind of absence, a failure to be present to what is actually in front of you. The distracted person is not fully anywhere. They are half in the room and half in the feed, half listening and half composing their next thought, half here and half somewhere else.

The moral dimension of this is easy to miss. We tend to think of attention as a personal resource, something we manage for our own productivity or well-being. But attention is also how we show up for other people. To give someone your full attention is to say, without words, that they matter, that this moment matters, that you are choosing to be here with them instead of anywhere else. To withhold attention, to glance at your phone while someone is talking, to let your mind wander to your to-do list while your child is telling you about their day, is to say the opposite.

This doesn't mean every moment requires full presence. That would be exhausting and probably impossible. But it does mean that attention is a choice, and choices have consequences. The person who never puts down their phone is not just missing information. They are practicing a habit of partial presence, training themselves to be perpetually elsewhere. Over time, this becomes who they are: someone who is never quite here, never quite available, never quite able to sustain the kind of attention that real connection requires.

The attention economy profits from this. Partial presence is good for engagement. The person who checks their phone every few minutes is a better customer than the person who leaves it in another room. The feeds are designed to reward the quick glance, the brief scroll, the constant return. Depth is the enemy of engagement. The algorithm wants you shallow and frequent, not deep and sustained.

Weil wrote that attention, properly understood, is prayer. She didn't mean this metaphorically. She meant that the act of attending fully to something, whether a math problem or a suffering person or a line of poetry, was a way of opening yourself to what is real, and that this opening was the same gesture as prayer. The content didn't matter as much as the quality of attention. To attend fully was to practice the presence of God, whether you called it that or not.

You don't have to share her theology to recognize the insight. Attention is formative. What you attend to shapes what you become. The person who spends hours each day attending to outrage will become more prone to outrage. The person who attends to beauty will become more capable of seeing it. The person who attends to other people, fully and generously, will become the kind of person others want to be around.

The question, then, is not just how to protect your attention from those who want to steal it. The question is what you want to become, and whether your attention is pointed in that direction. The apps will keep asking for your attention. They are very good at asking. The answer you give, repeated thousands of times, is the answer to a deeper question: What kind of person are you practicing to be?