Just for a moment, we need to pay attention to attention. Intense kisses, quality time, passionate hugs, memorable gifts and captivating messages. Doesn’t that sound like a love poem? We are fascinated by being wanted, admired and entertained.
An entire economy is built on attention. Adverts are blended into our everyday clicks, posts and reels, where our attention is packaged and sold for profit.
Remember: “If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.” Attention drives our need to be loved, accepted, heard and validated. Pleasure, confidence and excitement follow. Our senses awaken to the “I see you, please see me” longing for human connection.
To love is to pay attention – so we are told. Psychologist Tara Brach said that “attention is the most basic form of love.” Without attention, love fades. But is attention equal to love? I am not convinced. Attention is fleeting, easy, superficial and reactive. It shows up for the fun parts and disappears when the going gets tough. Immediacy and chemical highs are attention’s happiness currency.
Fast connection, fast responses, fast feelings, fast love – a fast-fast-everything world. Attention shouts not of the one for keeps, but of the one for now. But this seems hollow. At the core of attention are unmet needs, fragile self-worth and a longing for connection. Complex human behaviour is monetised and reduced to five rigid boxes called love languages by the self-help industry. The obvious is stated as groundbreaking. You are taught that with a kiss, touch or quality time, your love life is good to go. Seriously? Who doesn’t know that and more?
We lose our authentic selves and narrow our awareness.
Robert Greene writes: “If it is attention we need, we often experience a kind of emptiness inside that we hope to fill with the false love of public approval.” Our brains chase quick rewards. We turn ourselves into objects of our own desires, and of others. We are producers, directors and actors in our own movie, performing for applause. Welcome to your lights, camera, action life.
With attention, we feel touched by life’s kindness and see our names in lights. We crave larger-than-life red-carpet moments filled with paparazzi energy. Epictetus warned nearly 2 000 years ago that “you become what you give your attention to.”
But maybe the cure for our desire for attention is love. Genuine love. We should silence the voices that treat our worth as a crisis needing emergency intervention. We don’t need external applause to exist and be appreciated. Lasting bonds are forged from real-time memories, not feel-good texts of convenience.
Love is quiet, kind, and selfless. It declares: “I am here to stay, to understand your innermost core.” Love knows that light, meaning and wholeness come from within, not from online likes and views. When we know we are loved, we need not fight to prove our worth. Why should we? We don’t need psychological masks. No illusions. No artificial self-editing. All we need is to allow ourselves to be ourselves, and love love.
