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DonatePublished on November 14, 2024 by Ben Bartosik, Manager of Brand and Creative | Evergreen
How’s your attention span lately? Maybe this isn’t something that you’ve really stopped to think about, but if you were to rank it on a simple scale of 1 – 10, where would you put it? And would you say it’s getting better or worse?
If you’re finding it harder than ever to keep your mind focused these days without constant distraction, you’re not alone. There has been a lot of speculation over the last few years that our attention spans might be getting worse. Whether or not this is true, it’s certainly something that a lot of people are feeling.
It’s been said that what you pay attention to shapes your world, which raises the question, how does your world look these days?
Our minds seem to be in a non-stop daily struggle for attention against a deluge of to-do lists, emails, DMs, alerts, 24/7 news cycles, social feeds, streaming services, algorithm-based suggestions for new content, personalized advertising and oh won’t someone please let me off this ride.
In the attention economy, we’re not just the customer — we’re also the product.
This is because hundreds of billions of dollars every year are spent on new and innovative ways of competing for and holding our attention. The world’s best and most creative minds are working overtime to get us to want, click, shop, sign up, scroll, post and keep us engaged in about a million other ways. This is how much our attention is worth to them. It’s a game we can’t win, and we never really stood a chance.
The good news is that if you’re ready for something different, maybe we can change the game.
Hurry and FOMO (the fear of missing out) are a large part of what fuels the attention economy. Sophisticated algorithms play to our anxieties that if we turn away, we might miss out on something important. And the speed at which these feeds move requires an impulsive approach to engagement in order to keep up. This is why the content that performs best is usually designed to trigger immediate emotional reactions such as outrage, jealousy or fear.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Facebook (Meta)’s original motto was “move fast and break things.”
I propose that an alternative is to embrace slow and intentional activities that require sustained focus and resist the urge to hurry or jump to each new mental distraction. There are loads of little hacks and tricks you could use to try and turn down the digital noise that competes for our attention, but the best way is to embrace the deliberate slowness of analogue experiences:
It’s not enough to just say, put your phone down and go do something else. If we want to cultivate a slower way of being in the world, we need spaces that allow us to linger and move through them at a more leisurely pace. Spaces that are intentionally designed to surprise us, delight us, connect us and deepen our awareness of them.
The best cities are full of these spaces; the problem is that we often fail to notice them (or our need for them) when we move too quickly. This means we also need to slow down in how we move through our cities.
Did you know that the human brain processes about 50% more peripheral information when moving on foot than in a vehicle? We’re missing half of what a city has to offer simply because we’re usually driving through them.
Want to really slow down and become more attentive? Go for a walk.
If you haven’t noticed, human beings are bipedal, meaning we evolved for walking great distances and in a variety of climates. Walking has been called the most basic of human activities. It’s one of the first major physical milestones we celebrate in childhood. It’s attributed to all sorts of positive health benefits, both physically and mentally.
Getting outside and taking a walk in nature is one of the best things you can do for your mental health if you’re feeling overwhelmed, distracted or melancholy.
Studies have even shown that walking is also one of the best ways to deepen our relationship with where we live, a bond that is crucial for forming stronger communities. This is perhaps why commuters tend to be less civically engaged than those who live and work in the same space.
Jenny Odell, an author who has written about the attention economy, suggests that focusing our attention leads to awareness and that “simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.” By walking regularly within a space, we begin to feel responsible for it. This nurtures a desire to take care of it.
My concern for where I live is directly connected to the time I spend walking through it. It builds empathy for those who must navigate the streets because they aren’t able to drive or who might have limited mobility. Mundane occurrences like a car parked across a sidewalk or a pile of snow blocking easy access to a crosswalk button take on new meaning to me. When we slow down and spend time walking in public spaces, we see our cities from new angles, which can ultimately make us better neighbours.
All of this is why we’re so passionate about better cities and the amazing public spaces within them. At a time when our digital lives have become more frenzied and polarized than ever before, we think it’s crucial to have spaces where people can slow down and reconnect with each other, with nature and with the place itself.
So, this season, take a break from doom scrolling and consider doing some city strolling. Embrace a journey in a great public space guided by your own sense of discovery and not what an algorithm wants to sell you. And more than anything, just slow down and give your over-extended attention some much-needed rest.
