This Is Labor
On Trained Attention and the Work — Contemplative and Otherwise — of Seeing Past It
There is a passage in David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address (the one that was later published as This Is Water) that has haunted me for two decades — not because it is uplifting (which it is, in the way that honest things sometimes are), but because of a single counterintuitive claim buried inside it. Wallace’s official subject was the liberal arts and how education might help you choose, consciously, what to worship. The passage I keep returning to, however, is the one about attention itself: that the most important kind of freedom, the kind most worth wanting, involves “attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty, unsexy ways, every day.”
He was describing something that sounded, in the moment I first read it, almost embarrassingly obvious. Of course we should pay attention to other people. Of course we should care. But Wallace's deeper claim wasn't moral — it was perceptual: that the capacity to attend in this way, carefully and consistently to what actually matters (rather than to what is loudest or most immediately rewarding) is not a natural condition but an achieved one, requiring labor of a very specific and underappreciated kind.
I have spent twenty-five years exploring — across contexts as different as Argentina’s economic collapse, wilderness education in Utah, and therapists’ conference rooms up and down the East Coast — what happens when people recognize that the attention patterns trained into them by professional and institutional life are not, as it turns out, adequate for the questions they most need to answer. What I have found, consistently, is that the problem is not one of knowledge or intention. The people I have spent time with, working alongside, and learning from… they knew perfectly well that something was inadequate about how they had been trained to see. The problem was always more fundamental: they didn’t know how to see differently, and they vastly underestimated the labor that learning to see differently would require.
The Crisis That Isn’t Being Named Correctly
There is no shortage of commentary right now about an “attention crisis” — a phrase that typically conjures images of TikTok, shortened reading spans, and the devastation wrought upon the adolescent brain by social media algorithms designed to maximize engagement. All of that is real, and none of it is what I mean.¹
The attention crisis I am describing is older, more fundamental, and in some ways more difficult to address precisely because it’s not the product of bad actors or addictive technology. It is the product of training. Every professional formation I have investigated — clinical psychology, wilderness education, cultural anthropology, nonprofit leadership — does something more radical than teaching its practitioners content or technique: it teaches them what to notice. A clinician learns to map symptoms; a wilderness guide learns to see potential hazards; an anthropologist learns to see systems and patterns. In each case, the training is successful precisely to the extent that the practitioner stops having to choose to attend this way, and simply finds herself doing it — which means, necessarily, that she is also not attending to other things, in ways she can no longer easily recognize, because the training that made certain perceptions automatic also made the cost of that automaticity invisible.
The training that made certain perceptions automatic also made the cost of that automaticity invisible.
To be clear: I am not describing this from the outside. My own training — a PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton — taught me to notice what is systematic in apparently random variation, to situate individual behavior in structural context, and often at a kind of analytic remove that makes certain kinds of understanding possible while making others genuinely difficult… including, as it turned out, the kind of understanding that requires full participation in what you are studying rather than ‘mere’ observation of it. That tension — between the trained attention that made me a competent researcher and the untrained attention that the research itself seemed to demand — is what eventually broke my dissertation and, over a much longer arc, set me on my present course.
None of this is wrong. All of it is, in fact, exactly what professional training is supposed to do. The problem arises — and it arises consistently, across every professional context to which I have been privy — when the trained mode of attention runs up against questions that it is structurally unable to address. Not wrong answers, but the wrong category: questions that the trained mode of attention cannot even formulate, let alone answer, because the training itself has made certain perceptions unavailable.
What Wallace Was Actually Describing
Wallace’s Kenyon address is usually read as an argument for empathy or for humanistic education broadly construed, and it is both of those things. But the sharpest and least-discussed element of the address is his phenomenology of default attention — what he calls “natural, hard-wired default settings” that make us experience ourselves as the center of the universe, not as a philosophical position, but as a lived, felt reality that shapes every perception we have.
His point is not that this is morally wrong (though he has views about that, too). His point is that it is the wrong mode of attention for the situations that actually require our attention. The supermarket checkout line, the traffic jam, the rote interactions of daily life — these are precisely the situations where default attention is most powerful and most costly, because they are the situations where it is most difficult to interrupt, and where the consequences of not interrupting it accumulate into a life that is smaller and less humane than it might have been.
What Wallace calls “real freedom” — the freedom that matters, as opposed to the freedom of getting whatever you want — is the freedom to choose what to attend to, and how. But this freedom is not given; it is achieved, and achieved only through something that looks uncomfortably like practice, in the almost athletic sense of that word: deliberate, repeated, effortful engagement with the very perceptions that default attention tends to skip over.
I want to push Wallace’s insight further than he took it, because I think it applies with particular force to the professional contexts I have been investigating. The “default settings” he describes are not only the product of human evolutionary wiring; they are also the product of training. Professional formation doesn’t just fail to interrupt default attention — in many cases, it actively cultivates and systematizes it, making certain modes of perception not just natural but authoritative, not just automatic but correct. Which means that the work of attending differently, in a professional context, requires interrupting not just the inherited wiring of self-centered perception but the socially validated wiring of one’s entire professional formation.
This is harder. Substantially harder. And the labor it requires is of a kind that professional culture is almost universally disinclined to recognize as labor at all.
The Labor Nobody Talks About
When I was twenty-three years old, working as a field instructor in a wilderness-based drug and alcohol treatment program in Utah, I taught meditation as part of a broader effort to bring contemplative practice into outdoor education. I was not an especially sophisticated meditation teacher — I was, essentially, a young adult who had read a few books and spent some time experimenting with a variety of practices, working in a program that combined twelve-step recovery with backcountry adventure, and what the program called ‘Native American’ ceremonial practice — but what I lacked in depth I compensated for with genuine conviction (which is not always a great pedagogical combination, but which does tend to produce interesting outcomes).
What I noticed, again and again across groups of young adults who were spending five-plus weeks in the backcountry, was that the capacity to attend differently — to notice what was actually in front of you, rather than to simply identify reflexively with the mental commentary running over it — did not emerge from instruction alone. People could understand the concept perfectly well. They could articulate the distinction between direct experience and the narrative overlay we construct over it. They could even have brief glimpses of what it felt like to actually inhabit the former rather than the latter. And then, when the instruction was over and the formal practice period ended, they snapped back almost immediately to their default mode of attention, because that mode was powerful and practiced, and the alternative was… not.
Years later, when I was conducting dissertation research, I found myself watching the same dynamic in a very different context: therapists, many of them highly trained and deeply thoughtful, who had recognized that their clinical training had left them unable to be present to certain kinds of suffering — not unable to diagnose it or treat it, but unable simply to be personally present with it; to situate what they thought of as their “authentic selves” in relation to it — and who were therefore seeking practices outside their professional formation: meditation, ceremony, contemplative Christianity, Indigenous healing traditions, forms of somatic work that their graduate programs had either dismissed or ignored.
What struck me, watching these practitioners over the years of fieldwork and follow-up conversation that went into my research, was how systematically they underestimated the difficulty of what they were undertaking, and how much the difficulty had to do not with the content of the practices themselves, but with the labor required to interrupt the trained attention that their professional formation had made automatic.
One therapist I followed over several years — I’ll call her Diane — had been meditating for a decade when I first met her, and had also spent considerable time in ceremony with Indigenous teachers, an experience that had fundamentally altered her relationship to uncertainty and presence. What she described, when I pushed her to characterize what had actually changed, was not the acquisition of new knowledge or new technique. It was something more like a renovation of what she was able to notice. She could sit with clients in silence now without feeling the need to fill the silence with intervention. She could tolerate not knowing what was happening, which, she said, paradoxically seemed to create more space for actual therapeutic movement than any amount of technique.
But the path to that capacity, she was emphatic, had been far more laborious than she had anticipated when she began. Not because the practices were difficult to understand — they weren’t — but because her clinical training had been so successful that it had made a certain mode of attention not just habitual but reflexive, not just practiced but felt as appropriate, so that interrupting it felt less like expanding her capacities and more like doing something professionally wrong. The internal resistance she encountered was not laziness or insufficient motivation. It was the resistance of a professional identity that had been carefully built to attend in specific ways, encountering a practice that required it to do something else.
What Practice Actually Looks Like
I want to be precise about something that often gets lost when contemplative practice is discussed in therapeutic or professional development contexts, which is that the practices I am describing are not primarily techniques for stress reduction or even for cultivating presence in some generic sense. At their most serious and demanding, contemplative practices are forms of ‘attention training’: ways of systematically practicing modes of perception that default attention does not cultivate, and that professional training typically forecloses.
At their most serious and demanding, contemplative practices are forms of ‘attention training’: ways of systematically practicing modes of perception that default attention does not cultivate, and that professional training typically forecloses.
Sitting in ceremony with Indigenous teachers — which I did, in the context of my fieldwork, with the explicit consent and guidance of practitioners who knew what I was there to learn — is not primarily a spiritual experience, though it may be that, too. It is, among other things, an experience of attending in a mode that is fundamentally different from the analytic, diagnostic, pattern-seeking attention that my graduate training had made automatic. It involves allowing perception to be genuinely multiple and simultaneous rather than sequential and organized; allowing the body’s information to register on the same level as the mind’s interpretation, rather than subordinating the former to the latter; attending to relationship and context rather than to isolated content or symptom.
None of this is easy to describe in the vocabulary available to academic or clinical writing, which is one reason why it tends to get either dismissed or over-spiritualized in professional contexts. But the practitioners I spent years working alongside were not ‘mystics’ in the sense of people whose access to these modes of attention was somehow innate or gifted. They were, rather, people who had done the work — specifically and effortfully — of interrupting their trained attention patterns often enough and for long enough that something else had become available to them.
That work is genuinely laborious in ways that professional culture does not want to acknowledge, because acknowledging it requires recognizing that the professional formation itself has costs — that the very training that makes clinical or academic or organizational competence possible is also, simultaneously, training in not seeing certain things, training in a mode of attention that is adequate for some purposes and inadequate for others.
What the contemplative and ceremonial traditions I encountered in my research share — across the enormous differences in their specific forms and cultural contexts — is a rigorous understanding of, and disciplined relationship to, this kind of labor. They do not promise quick transformation. They do not offer techniques that can be learned in a weekend retreat and instrumentally & efficaciously applied on Monday morning. They describe, with remarkable consistency, a process that unfolds across months and years of deliberate practice, in which the first and most fundamental obstacle is not ignorance, but the authority that trained attention claims over perception itself.
The meditation retreat that Diane described to me — three weeks of silence, of bringing her attention back to her breath thousands of times a day — is not primarily an experience of spiritual depth. It is, at its structural core, a highly refined form of the same repetitive attention training that any skilled practice requires: the guitarist running scales, the athlete drilling movement patterns, the surgeon practicing sutures, each of them cultivating a mode of perceiving and responding that is not natural but achieved, not given but built.
The difference — and it is a difference that professional culture persistently fails to appreciate — is that the scales and the drills and the suture practice are building modes of attention that professional culture already validates as legitimate and productive. The contemplative and ceremonial work I am describing is building modes of attention that professional culture tends to dismiss as irrelevant or insufficiently rigorous, precisely because those modes of attention make visible exactly what professional training has been most successful at making invisible.
I want to end this section with a story, because the argument I am making is difficult to hold in the abstract and easy to hold in the particular.
During the year I spent in Utah, each participant in the program undertook a four-day solo fast in the backcountry — a Vision Quest, in the loose appropriative terminology the program used. Four days alone, without food, in the slick rock and slot canyon country of the San Rafael Swell, on the ragged edge of the Four Corners. There was a woman in one of my cohorts — mid-thirties, from Los Angeles, unfailingly civil and utterly unreachable. I’d said it to her directly more than once: you’ve come an awful long way to do homework and run out the clock. She received this the way she received everything, politely, without letting it touch her. Nobody goes to rehab in the wilderness in the dead of winter unless something has gone seriously sideways… but she had managed, for four weeks, to be serious in a way that never quite cost her anything.
She went out on her Vision Quest. The first two days appeared uneventful. On the third day I went to drop water at her site — we didn’t interact with participants on solo, but we walked close enough to make sure they were still alive — and I knew something was different before I came over the last rise. Not a sound or a sight exactly, but a quality of the air; the kind of stillness that announces itself.
When I cleared the rise, I stopped walking. There was a herd of antelope — two hundred animals, perhaps more — lying on the ground in a wide semicircle that ran from one edge of the canyon rim to the other, bracketing her the way a rainbow brackets the horizon. The nearest were fifty yards out from her, roughly. Not a Disney scene; these were wild animals who had spent their entire lives avoiding human contact. But they were down, utterly calm, arranged around her with an unhurried particularity that made the word coincidence feel wildly insufficient.
She was sitting at the center of the arc. She looked up when I appeared, and we made eye contact across the distance.
I nodded — a nod meant to carry everything: I see this. I am witness to it. It is yours. I set down the water and left.
We never discussed it. What she did or didn’t do with that third morning on the canyon rim is her business, not mine. What I have carried forward is something I didn’t have language for until years later: that what the desert had done — what she had somehow made possible by finally, on day three, stopping the performance of imperviousness — was make her present enough that the world could respond to her. Not metaphorically. Literally. The antelope were there because she was finally, actually there.
This is what I mean by attention training that produces something other than technique. You cannot plan for two hundred antelope. You cannot produce this outcome by trying to produce it. What you can do, and what the extended labor of contemplative and ceremonial practice is actually in the business of producing, is: become the kind of presence to which the world can respond. That is not a mystical claim; it is a perceptual one. When you are attending fully and without agenda, the information available to you is different — qualitatively different — from what is available when you are attending through the filter of your professional formation’s trained imperatives. The antelope knew she was different on day three than she had been on day one. Whether she knew it yet hardly mattered.
Labor Omnia Vincit
The questions I return to, in my consultation practice (after a long route through wilderness programs and dissertation fieldwork and nonprofit executive work and the kind of organizational consulting that eventually made me realize I was more interested in the people doing the organizations than in the organizations themselves) are these: what are you attending to, and who taught you to attend that way, and is it adequate for the questions you actually need to answer?
These are not questions that can be answered quickly, because the trained mode of attention is not easily visible from inside it. One of the functions of professional formation, in fact, is to make the trained attention feel like ‘simply’ seeing — to naturalize a particular mode of perception to the point where it no longer registers as a mode, but as direct access to reality. The first work, therefore, is not the work of learning to see differently, but the prior and more difficult work of recognizing that you are already seeing in a particular way; that this way was taught to you, rather than given; and that its authority over your perception is not epistemological but social. This is not the philosopher’s observation that all perception is structured — a point so general as to be, for practical purposes, useless. It is the more specific and more uncomfortable recognition that your perception was structured by particular trainings, in particular institutional contexts, toward particular ends — and that those ends may not include the questions now keeping you up at night.
This is the moment at which most professionals, in my experience, encounter a very specific kind of resistance: not so much resistance to the idea that their professional training has shaped how they see (most sophisticated practitioners can acknowledge this intellectually with relative ease), but resistance to the felt implication, which is that the seeing they do so competently, and for which they have been rewarded so consistently, might be, in certain crucial respects, inadequate. Not wrong — just… insufficient; pointed in a useful direction, but unable to perceive what lies to the side.
The practices that interrupt trained attention — whether they are contemplative in the formal sense, or ceremonial in the Indigenous sense, or simply the kind of sustained, purposeless, apparently unproductive attention that a wilderness educator trying to help teenagers to notice what is actually in front of them is attempting to cultivate — share a quality that professional culture tends to find disconcerting. They don’t produce outcomes on the timelines that professional culture recognizes as legitimate. They require duration without immediate payoff. They ask practitioners to tolerate being bad at something, for extended periods, in domains where their professional formation has made them quite good at looking (and feeling) competent.
These practices work — when they work — not by teaching practitioners new content, but by making available modes of perception that were always there and were, to a significant extent, trained away. And every tradition I have encountered that actually sustains this work over time has done so collectively. The contemplative traditions have their sanghas and monasteries and retreat communities. The ceremonial traditions have their circles and lineages. Even the twelve-step programs, whatever their limitations, understand that the labor of interrupting a trained mode of attention is not work you can do alone — not because you lack the discipline, but because the conditions that make the work possible require other people to help protect them.
The recovery of what professional formation cost you is not a quick process, and it is not a process that professional culture — oriented as it is toward competence and efficient outcome production, embedded in an economic order that has made ‘unproductive’ functionally synonymous with worthless — is well positioned to support. This is not an individual failure of will or scheduling. The conditions that make this work so difficult to undertake are structural, which means that the actual path forward probably runs not through more individual practice but through the kind of community that can hold the practice collectively — but that is a different essay, and one I have only recently begun to write.
This is the crisis that I think we are not naming clearly enough: not the external crisis of shortened attention spans and algorithmic manipulation (though that is real), but the internal crisis of the accomplished, competent, credentialed professional who has been so successfully trained to attend in certain ways that she can no longer easily see what her training has made invisible — and who is now standing in front of questions, whether existential or political or relational, that require exactly the modes of attention her formation most assiduously foreclosed.
The labor required to address this is specific, demanding, and underestimated. It is also — and this is the part that tends to get lost in discussions of professional development and personal growth — genuinely possible, for people who are willing to take seriously not just the idea that their attention has been shaped but the actual, uncertain, unglamorous work of shaping it differently.
Wallace’s address ends, famously, with the assertion that this is water — the reminder that the most important realities are the ones we are most habituated not to see. What he didn’t say, but what twenty-five years of exploration have convinced me is equally true, is that learning to see the water is work. Real work, of the kind that professional culture rarely validates, and almost never schedules. The kind that requires—as Tony King’s note to Adam Ekberg put it—a different relationship to time entirely.
¹ David Harvey — yes, that David Harvey — once asked me, in the most understated British way imaginable, whether I wasn’t perhaps “biting off more than I could chew” in proposing to use chaos theory and strange attractors as an interpretive framework for postmodern urbanism. This was a seminar on ‘Modernity, Postmodernity, and the City’ that I had no business being in as a college freshman. I was eighteen and dismissive and… wrong. What I eventually turned in, after an extension and an all-nighter, was a paper that had quietly demoted “interpretive framework” to “watery metaphor” sometime around 3am and hoped nobody would notice. Harvey’s structural account of attention — i.e., that the acceleration of capital circulation requires and produces modes of attention systematically incompatible with the slower perceptual work genuine understanding demands — is correct, important, and would, if I let it, require me to actually engage with it rather than deploy it decoratively. I have chosen not to, both because professional formation is the dimension I have spent the most time investigating directly, and because the man already warned me once. He has the better structural analysis. I… have different kinds of evidence.
This is the first essay in a three-part series. I wrote it because I couldn’t get to what I wanted to say about AI systems — more particularly, on attention ontology in multi-agent AI systems — without establishing, first, what attention actually is and what training it actually costs.