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.

The Work of Keeping Meaning Alive: 1 Meaning Does Not Persist

The Uncomfortable Claim

Meaning does not last.

It does not endure by default. It does not stabilise through repetition. It does not carry itself forward simply because it once mattered.

Left unattended, meaning decays.

This is not a moral failure. It is not a cultural pathology. It is not a sign of distraction or corruption. It is a structural fact.

Decay Without Opposition

Meaning does not require enemies in order to disappear.

It fades through neglect, through routine, through the slow conversion of attention into habit. What once demanded care becomes familiar. What was once open becomes settled. What once mattered becomes assumed — and then inert.

Nothing has to attack meaning for this to happen.

Time is sufficient.

Attention as a Finite Resource

Meaning persists only where attention is actively sustained.

Attention is not an attitude. It is not a disposition. It is not a trait. It is labour.

It requires effort, energy, and renewal. It is consumed by use and exhausted by repetition. When attention thins, meaning follows.

This is why meaning cannot be stored.

The Myth of Preservation

We speak as if meaning can be preserved — in texts, artworks, traditions, recordings, archives.

But what is preserved is form, not significance.

Significance is not contained in objects. It is actualised in relation. Without renewed attention, preserved forms become inert. They remain available, but no longer alive.

Preservation delays loss. It does not prevent it.

Why This Is Difficult to Accept

The idea that meaning does not persist is uncomfortable because it offers no security.

There is no guarantee that what matters now will matter later.

There is no mechanism that carries significance forward on our behalf.

Meaning demands to be met again — or it is lost.

Implication

If meaning does not persist, then its survival depends on ongoing work.

Not explanation.

Not justification.

Work.

The next episode will examine the nature of that work — and why attention, rather than insight or intention, is its primary cost.