🐰 Want Focus? Start by Asking What You Truly Value | Attention Crisis, Part Three
Sep 04, 2025 6:46 pm
🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️
“We cannot live harmlessly on this Earth. We have all got to live somewhere and do some kind of work, and in doing that we use up and wear out things. So the only question is: how to use the things that we use up in such a way that we do no permanent damage to them?”
~ Wendell Berry
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Greetings, dear newsletter subscriber,
- Who are you?
- What do you value?
- What do you truly want out of life?
We live in a world that constantly pulls at our attention...and what we value plays a huge role in our response...
Notifications, endless feeds, and the quiet creep of new technologies have made focus harder than ever. What to do? Most of the advice out there about “productivity hacks” and “time management” skips over the most important step...
Before we can truly reclaim our focus, we have to ask ourselves those basic, but often-overlooked, questions:
- Who am I?
- What do I value?
- What do I truly want out of life?
In my latest installment, I suggest that regaining our attention is less about willpower and more about values—and how technology shapes those values without us even noticing. Drawing on Neil Postman’s insights into media ecology (surprise, surprise(!)), I show how to spot technology creep and what we can do to take the first step toward regaining control of our attention.
Please let me know your thoughts by either responding to this email, or commenting on the blog!
Have a great weekend, and we'll see you again next week!
To more focused attention(!)
Warmly,
Herman
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