About a year ago, I wrote a post here called Attention Machines.
Then yesterday, I encountered a guy who embodied the ethos of attention machines in the way he carried himself in the world.
I was checking out treehouses at a local farm, when I met him. It turned we had both spent time at another farm, which had dysfunctional owners. I immediately started speaking negatively about those folks.
The guy gently changed the subject.
“Talking shit about them…we could do that all day,” he said.
Later in the conversation, we talked about Mormonism’s prohibition on porn, and how Utah has, paradoxically, the highest rate of paid subscribers to online porn.
“Now I think porno is terrible. But when you focus on being against something, it gives that thing more power,” he said. Case in point: this reddit thread.
I recently participated in The Festival Of Yes, put on by my friend Alex. I admired Alex’s hard work on the festival, and also on his camper van, Big Tina, which has beautiful wood paneling inside.
“I like big projects,” Alex said.
It strikes me that projects are some of the best attention machines that there are. Whether the project is small (like throwing a birthday party or fixing something in the house), or huge (like raising a kid) or intermediate (like throwing a festival), projects involve us with the world, other people, and get us out of our heads. Our attention gets occupied by the positive thing, the project, rather than a negative thing (e.g. not gossipping or watching porn).
Projects are stoke-filled positive pointers for our attention, much more effective than prohibitions.
danscreativeoulet 