Protective Attention
Technical Work and the Avoidance of Spiritual Self-Mutilation
Fractured attention begets fractured solutions, and they will drown you over time. Despite the copious amounts of ink, pixels, and breath spent denying this simple fact, the cognitive and ergetic impacts of continuous distraction are massive and have persistent deleterious effects on workers and businesses as a whole.
Pre-dawn troubleshooting of issues flagged by your alerting system and days full of distractions by coworkers, “emergencies”, and every communication app under the sun make it easy to forget the value of focus and the methods of its cultivation. Simone Weil, in a letter to unruly schoolchildren1, elevates focused attention to the prime object of school studies, directly connecting the increased ability to focus with an enhanced ability to direct devotional action towards God. I suggest here that there are parallels to this with technical work, and that adopting Weil’s stance can help turn dehumanizing work towards God.
The most remarkable irony of the Dune universe is found in how a civilization that waged total war on computers and enforced a complete ban on their use winds up turning large swathes of humanity into living computers. Several monastic castes have developed their own preternatural disciplines for cultivating the ability to do some sorts of computation by their disciples, but the caste that interests me the most is that of the guild navigator. These humans, in their pursuit of the ability to pilot the ships that are the backbone of interstellar commerce, have turned themselves into living grotesques as they force their bodies and mind to handle literally inhuman workloads. They are well enumerated for their labor, but we need to ask: how much can done with such a body, confined to a tank designed to fulfill their inhuman nutritional needs?
Sometimes, after I escape the thrall of troubleshooting some difficult technical problem, I feel like this guild navigator. Slowly warping my mind in pursuit of narrow goals I don’t share, and perhaps using the best cognitive years of my life to ensure that the backbone of commerce can continue to flow and be utilized effectively.
I must ask, is there a better way?
“But HC”, you might be thinking, “how can you go on about the deforming hyperfocus of guild navigators, and yet go on about distraction? Exactly what point are you trying to make?”, and you would be precisely on the nose. And I would answer: I must envy the guild navigator. I must envy the guild navigator because unlike the case of most technologists in 2023, the goal of his computation is clear, the process well-practiced, his work dealing with the material world, and his work is distraction free as a hard requirement. Almost like a pure function — taking inputs and emitting outputs. If one must render themselves a machine, at least let it be one that operates as close to the fabric of existence as possible, and not one that must ceaselessly sift through mounds and mounds of unskilled complexity and mess, eventually forced to embody the mess as a means of more effectively dealing with it, forced to enter flow states to deal with dreck, until it coats their psyche and their intellect and their spirit…
I realize that the things I care most about doing in this life will require persistent and elevated focus, virtue, and performance. I know from direct experience the seductive power of saying to yourself “oh I’ll just put in the hours, so what” or “yes I’m distracted and yes this work is unfulfilling and yes I’m not pushing pushing myself, but I’m collecting paychecks and once this is done I’ll shape up”. The reality is, just as Weil told those schoolboys, every moment is an opportunity to build virtue. Weil specifically mentions the virtue of attentive focus, but I say that extending this stance to all virtues is fidelitous to her worldview. Weil has helped me to realize that every moment can be transformed into preparation to serve God. Even further, owing to the characteristics of virtuous cycles, building focus begets focus, as you are better able to arrive at and execute technical abstractions that relieve you from toil, instead of adding it.
The habits that build focus, focus itself, and the constant relation of my actions towards my professed (and hopefully embodied) desire to devote my life to God, can help protect me against the dehumanizing forces of technological work.
The Right Use of School Studies. A version of this letter can be found here. I had the fortune of reading the Plough Publishing House edition several years ago.
I appreciate you taking the time to discuss this. You may have just inspired me to write something in this vein