I always arrive for class five or ten minutes early to set up—log in to the computer, turn on the projector, get my notes arranged, the usual. When I began teaching in 2009, the classroom was generally noisy with student chatter during these minutes. Over the years, and especially since the start of the pandemic, things have grown quieter. Many students now walk into the room with headphones on, looking at their phones. I have to speak loudly just to cut through the silence with my “Okay, let’s get started.” Recently, a student left his earbuds in, and when I asked him to remove them, he told me it made no difference since they were on “transparency mode.”
I get it; I have earbuds, too. I seldom run an errand without entertainment running through my head or go for a walk without a reality buffer. Like my students, and, indeed, like many in this society, I find habits of attention difficult to cultivate. Part of the problem is my trying to remember and practice these intentions alone, while the alternative is backed by corporate interests and the attention-capturing tech they design. As Thomas Merton says, we live in “a world in which [human beings] are dominated by massive organizations and rigid institutions which seek only to exploit them for money and power.” Even when we intentionally use our phones and other technology for felicitous purposes, we are buying into something whose intended aim is indifferent to our happiness.
The ways in which our attention economy threatens the possibility and depth of learning are obvious. I sometimes recall with wonder the habits I practiced in graduate school: spending long hours in libraries and coffee shops with only paper books and notebooks, and focusing on one thing at a time, unbothered by notifications. I have to remind myself now that my capacity for reading and thinking is the product of such habits, even if practicing them has grown harder. What seems straightforward to me in an introductory course textbook may demand a level of sustained attention that my students have never imagined, let alone practiced.
What seems straightforward to me in an introductory course textbook may demand a level of sustained attention that my students have never imagined, let alone practiced.
Lately I have been thinking about not only what all of this means for my teaching goals but also what it means for our society, the challenges it poses to the basic human quest to live a life of meaning and purpose. In an essay on community engagement in At This Time and In This Place, Darby Ray writes that “screen-focused minds are often frenetically mobile, always on the lookout for the next tweet, text, status update, or image” and that unless “counteracted by disciplines of attentiveness, this habit portends a life of distraction and superficiality.” Part of the challenge is that being inattentive—satisfactorily entertained but never deeply engaged—doesn’t require discipline at all. With its monetary backing, distraction is a steamroller.
College students already know that a life of “distraction and superficiality” does not offer deep satisfaction, which means that they know they need to gain some distance from social conventions. And as powerful as “brain hacking” may be, they usually identify a more ancient foe as the main obstacle to change: the desire to conform. They grant that apps are designed to be compelling and addictive, but they attribute even more power to their own fear of opting out. Making space for practices of attention that are conducive to genuine wellbeing will make them seem weird. In other words, they worry that if they seek the kind of life that they know is deeply satisfying, then they’ll miss out on the satisfaction anyway because they won’t have the approval of the crowd.
Recently I asked a classroom full of undergraduates to imagine the most important advice that they could give to their younger selves. There were varied answers, but the majority revolved around not caring so much about what others think of them. Too bad the advice wouldn’t work, one student insisted, because it can only be learned through experience. You must start out by caring too much about what other people think so you can see for yourself that it doesn’t make you happy. For many of us, this crucial discovery takes place sometime during college. But even then, we don’t always learn the right lesson from the unhappiness. We might just assume that we’re not doing enough to measure up and miss the truth that we’re using the wrong measure.
At such precarious moments, it is important to validate “wandering,” which Lyanda Lynn Haupt describes in Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit as those activities whose value doesn’t show up on familiar scales. “Decoupled from overt value in the usual measures, wandering is an unorthodox act, removing us from the anthropic realm of striving, judgment, and economic utility,” she writes. Wandering, in this sense, means existing without measuring ourselves comparatively. It might look like going for a “pointless” walk, or reading a few pages of a novel no one asked you to read, or taking someone’s portrait just to study their face, or patiently watching the light change in the early morning sky. When we give up what we thought defined our lives, even for a few minutes, we find that we still live. Paradoxically, when we take time to practice being for no measurable gain at all, we gain the immeasurable.
Thomas Merton describes the practice of contemplation in a similar way, as “a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source.” This realization can be evoked by a wide range of activities, except those that contribute to what Merton calls the false self. The false self is who I think I am when I imagine that I am my own author, the “me” whose validity rests entirely on others’ affirmation, who wouldn’t be caught dead looking weird. By contrast, in contemplation, as in pointless wandering, I discover my authentic self “as received, as a present from God, as a free gift of love.” I find that students don’t always resonate with Merton’s monastic lifestyle or his God language, but they love him for clarifying that any life worth living must know a deeper source of value than conformity to societal norms. In this, Merton gives them motivation to evade the steamroller of distraction, to say yes to a little weirdness and wandering.
The forest trail is the one place I don’t even think to bring my headphones; I need to keep my ears open for the birds. Haupt mentions recent studies that show that “humans are more creative, physically hale, and less depressed after walking in a forest,” which makes sense. We are earthlings. Walking the earth is a practice of being who we are. Culturally, however, we are viewed as weird if we befriend birds and listen to the wind and hug trees, or find ourselves in our embodied earthliness rather than in our tech-mediated identity and status. Yet Haupt insists that to get more of what we’re really looking for—a life of deep meaning and satisfaction—we need to develop the courage to stand apart: “We have come to an earthen moment wherein we must make all the connections we are able with the whole of life, no matter how at-risk that puts our public-facing façade of normality” (emphasis mine). She describes this façade much as Merton might, as a mask laden with “useless cares” that we need to outgrow. Today’s masks feel more attractive and powerful than ever, but the human desire to outgrow them abides. The flame of courage still burns. We only need to feed it.
Justin Klassen is an associate professor of theology & religious studies at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, where he also serves on the Mission Council. He is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow, and was a member of the 2021 cohort of the Faculty Seminar on Teaching Vocational Exploration. He is the author of a recent op-ed on the value and purpose of a college education. For more posts by Justin, click here.