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In the morning I sit on the couch with my precious younger daughter. She is six years old, and her sweet soft breath is on my cheek as she cuddles up with a book, asking me to read to her before we walk to school. Her attention is uncorrupted and pure. There is nothing in this life that is better. And yet I feel the instinct, almost physical, to look at the little attention box sitting in my pocket. I let it pass with a small amount of effort. But it pulses there like Gollum's ring.

My ability to reject its little tug means I'm still alive, a whole human self. In the shame-ridden moments when I succumb, though, I wonder what exactly I am or have become. I keep coming back to James's phrase "what I agree to attend to" because that word "agree" in his formulation carries enormous weight. Even if the demand for our attention comes from outside us, James believed that we ultimately controlled where we put it, that in "agreeing" to attend to something we offered our consent. James was rather obsessed with the question of free will, whether we in fact had it and how it worked. To him, "effort of attention"—deciding where to direct our thoughts—was "the essential phenomenon of will." It was one and the same. No wonder I feel alienated from myself when the attention box in my pocket compels me seemingly against my own volition.

The ambulance siren can be a nuisance in a loud, crowded city streetscape, but at least it compels our attention for a socially useful purpose. The Sirens of Greek myth compel our attention to speed our own death. What Odysseus was doing with the wax and the mast was actively trying to manage his own attention. As dramatic as that Homeric passage is, it's also, for us in the attention age, almost mundane. Because to live at this moment in the world, both online and off, is to find oneself endlessly wriggling on the mast, fighting for control of our very being against the ceaseless siren calls of the people and devices and corporations and malevolent actors trying to trap it.

That's basically the world we've built for our minds. Well, maybe not "we," per se. Our agency in the construction of the business and institutions of the attention age is a matter of considerable debate. The combination of our deepest biological instincts and the iterative genius of global capitalism means we are subject to an endless process of experimentation, whereby some of the largest corporations in the history of humanity spend billions to find out what we crave and how much of that they can sell us. From inside our own being, attention is what constitutes our very self, but from the perspective of entities outside of us, attention is like gold in a stream, oil in a rock.

My professional life requires me to be particularly consumed by these questions, but I think we all feel this to some degree, don't we? The alienating experience of being divided and distracted in spite of ourselves, to be here but not present. I bet you could spend day and night in any city or town canvassing strangers and not find a single one who told you they felt like their attention span was too long, that they were too focused, who wished they had more distractions, or spent more time looking at screens. Like traffic, our phones are now the source of universal complaint, a way to strike up a conversation in a barber shop or grocery line. What began as small voices at the margins warning us that the tech titans were offering us a Faustian bargain has coalesced into something approaching an emerging consensus: things are bad, and the technologies we all use every day are the cause. The phones are warbling us to death.

But before we simply accept this at face value and move on with our inquiry, it's worth poking a bit at this quickly forming conventional wisdom. I mean, don't we always go through this cycle? Don't people always feel that things are wrong and that it's because of kids these days? Or the new technology (printing press, steam engine, et cetera) has been our ruin?

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In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates goes on a long rant—half persuasive and half ludicrous—about the peril posed by the new technology of...writing: "If men learn [the art of writing]," Socrates warns, "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder."

It seems safe to say in hindsight that writing was a pretty big net positive for human development, even if one of the greatest thinkers of all-time worried about it the same way contemporaries fret over video games. Indeed, it often feels that for all the legitimate criticism of social media and the experience of ubiquitous screens and connectivity, a kind of familiar neurotic hysteria undergirds the dire warnings. An entire subgenre of parenting advice books and blocking software now exists to manage "screen time" and the mortal peril introduced by our devices into the brain development of children; the broader cultural conversation has taken on all the overdetermined ferocity of a moral panic. In 2009, the Daily Mail alerted its readers to "How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer." The New York Post warned that screens are "digital heroin" that turn kids into "psychotic junkies." "Teens on social media go from dumb to dangerous," CBS cautioned. And The Atlantic was just one of many to ask the question: "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" In 2024, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation, which argues that ubiquitous access to smartphones has consigned an entire generation of teens and children to unprecedented levels of depression, anxiety, and self-harm. While some scholars who studied the issue criticized Haidt's polemic for being overcooked, it was a runaway bestseller, and parents and schools across the country organized efforts to keep phones out of schools, as the book urged.