The Work of Keeping Meaning Alive: 2 Attention Is Labour

Against Effortlessness

Attention is often described as a capacity.

Something we have.

Something we can direct.

Something that fails only when we are distracted, careless, or undisciplined.

This description is wrong.

Attention is not a capacity. It is labour.

The Cost of Staying With

To attend is not merely to notice. It is to stay with what resists immediacy, familiarity, or use.

Attention requires effort because it runs against default tendencies:

• to automate perception,

• to settle interpretation,

• to convert encounter into function.

What demands attention does so precisely because it cannot be processed quickly or resolved efficiently.

Exhaustion, Not Weakness

When attention fails, it is rarely because of indifference.

More often, it fails because it is tired.

Attention depletes. It wears down through repetition, cognitive load, emotional strain, and the constant demand to respond. This depletion is structural, not personal.

To lose attention is not to lack care. It is to have spent it.

Why Automation Is So Tempting

Automation promises relief.

It offers speed without effort, response without deliberation, recognition without relation. Automated attention feels like competence. It feels efficient. It feels sustainable.

But what it sustains is function, not meaning.

Automated attention replaces engagement with pattern recognition. It preserves behaviour while emptying significance.

Attention as Work, Not Insight

Attention does not deepen automatically with understanding.

Insight can sharpen attention, but it cannot replace it. One can know perfectly well what matters and still fail to attend to it.

This is why meaning cannot be secured by clarity, explanation, or commitment. None of these do the work that attention does.

The Asymmetry of Effort

Attention is asymmetrical.

It costs more to give than it returns.

It rarely produces visible outcomes.

It is often unnoticed, unmeasured, and unrewarded.

And yet, without it, meaning collapses into habit or noise.

Implication

If attention is labour, then the work of keeping meaning alive is costly by definition.

There is no technique that eliminates this cost.

There is no optimisation that preserves meaning without effort.

The next episode will examine repetition — the condition under which attention is most strained, and where meaning most often dies quietly.