The Puzzle of Attention

Why do people seek attention? It is one thing to recognize the attention needs of people, another to locate its roots.

The easy explanation is that we need others’ attention before we can get something from them or induce them to do something for us. We avoid some people’s attention because we don’t want to have “anything to do” with them. But while all this is undoubtedly true, the explanation is insufficient. In many of our interactions, not least the most intimate, attention, as such, is a value we seek in and of itself. To illustrate:

Suppose I am invited to a party by a pleasant couple I have met. I show up and find a lot of people already present. A stranger receives me at the door, asks my name, leads me into the room full of people, and introduces me to the nearest group. The group opens and includes me. Drinks, snacks are served. I lack nothing, not even pleasant conversation. But I notice that my host and hostess actually receive guests who arrive after I do; they also spend some time fussing over them. But they never even approach me. And at the end, as the party is breaking up, and the hosts are saying their good-byes to everyone, they manage to be diverted just as I approach. I wait for a bit at the door—but they don’t return. Finally, a bit embarrassed, I just leave.

That party will stick in memory as a failure despite the excellent champagne, tasty food, and a dozen people with whom I held interesting conversations. But why am I distraught? Because I failed to get the minimum attention I thought that I’d deserved. The couple had invited me—paid me some attention—then treated me as if I did not exist. The party would have been quite satisfactory had I had, say, forty seconds of actual one-on-one with even one member of that couple.

Odd, isn’t it? The attention I did receive from other guests was not a substitute. The pleasant couple, in retrospect, therefore comes to be negatively tinged in my memories.

Now let’s sharpen this example and suppose that I can always get adequate attention from people with whom I’m only casually linked—store clerks, people in parks, at concerts, in libraries—but never from people I value. Let us say that people I value will interact with me, but only very casually and only ever at my instigation. They’re pleasant, but it’s a formal sort of pleasantry, nothing even approaching intimacy. They might wave casually but never rush up to me, never inquire with any feeling how I am, what I have been doing.

It would be the strangest sort of thing. To write a story about such a person would rapidly build suspense. The reader would want to know the reason why. It would be a kind of shunning. But why is shunning painful if—as in this case—the person would get all that he or she needs to have the usual things that civilization provides—nice car, apartment, ample funds, good health, etc.

Is there some kind of hidden energy inside genuine attention. Is genuine attention something we need in order genuinely to be. Or to be well? Is love, which makes the world go round, the secret ingredient in attention—that which makes us really value it? Is that the case? And could we really continue to live without it—or with the thinned out form of it which casual relations give us?

That something of genuine value is present in attention is embedded in language. We say “pay attention.” A payment is something of value bestowed on someone else. In German the directly translation of that phrase is to “gift attention,” Aufmerksamkeit schenken. In that formulation too, a gift is something of value. To pay attention to something or to someone, therefore, implies giving something of value, something that we possess, to someone or something outside of us. The very fact that we need attention as such—not merely in order to get some external service or material object—testifies to the mysterious quality of attention, to an energy within it, which may be the energy of love. Scattering this energy on all sorts of unworthy objects and distractions would therefore seem to be a negligent sort of expenditure of a hidden treasure.