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Attention: A Love Story
What do we talk about when we talk about attention? We might start with the studies: the average American unlocks their iPhone eighty times a day; the average millennial checks their phone almost twice as often. These kinds of statistics tell the story of the last decade, as technology has wound its way into our lives as never before. But Casey Schwartz grapples with the larger questions emerging from this change, offering a focus on attention itself. What is it? What does it mean when we give it away?
Expanding on her popular New York Times Magazine article, "Generation Adderall," Schwartz details the decade she spent taking prescription pills to help her pay attention (or so she thought), then moves outward to consider the wider landscape of attention, past and present. From our craving for distraction to our craving for a cure, from Silicon Valley to psychedelics to the works and lives of writers like David Foster Wallace, Aldous Huxley, William James, and Simone Weil, who each wrote powerfully about attention's role in defining our lives, Schwartz acts as our sympathetic and qualified guide.
Blending memoir, biography, and original reporting, Schwartz examines her attempts to preserve her authentic life and see what's most important in it. Attention: A Love Story will resonate with readers who want to determine their own minds, away from the siren call of their screens.
Expanding on her popular New York Times Magazine article, "Generation Adderall," Schwartz details the decade she spent taking prescription pills to help her pay attention (or so she thought), then moves outward to consider the wider landscape of attention, past and present. From our craving for distraction to our craving for a cure, from Silicon Valley to psychedelics to the works and lives of writers like David Foster Wallace, Aldous Huxley, William James, and Simone Weil, who each wrote powerfully about attention's role in defining our lives, Schwartz acts as our sympathetic and qualified guide.
Blending memoir, biography, and original reporting, Schwartz examines her attempts to preserve her authentic life and see what's most important in it. Attention: A Love Story will resonate with readers who want to determine their own minds, away from the siren call of their screens.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2020
53 people are currently reading
1854 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
April 11, 2020
The author was asked by her publisher why the world really needs this book after her first draught, and sent the author to re-write the whole thing. She should't have bothered- the world doesn't need this new re-write either. We're left with giant waste of time by a self absorbed, entitled gen Y / millennial. Basically the author veers away from the synopsis and takes everything from the current zeitgeist, hurls it at a wall like a Jackson Pollock and sees what sticks. We first go totally off topic with a story of her stalking David Foster Wallace's house and a huge synopsis of his vast book. Then she starts with what amounts to a U turn and starts writing about the fad of microdosing that she does't really understand, her main source being Ayelet Waldman's extremely weak pop science / memoir "A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life". We then hear about this Brooklynite goes to the Amazon to try Ayahuasca which she ends up not taking and merely becomes pissed off with the other attendees. Clearly she missed the fact that on any given day Ayahuasca sessions take place in Brooklyn in which anyone can attend for about $20. The book even evolves into chick lit where she insists on adding her personal liaisons with many men. She then describes how handsome many of her sources are. I could go on but Casey Schwartz already stole 4 hours of my life (yes, you could read the entire thing standing in a bookstore), in fact it should by filed under non fiction YA books if that category existed since there is no science other than anecdotes in this pulp. Save your money- the book has nothing to do with ADD / ADHD at all, it's the whining of somebody who isn't nearly as smart as she thinks she is
November 4, 2019
This book overall failed to hold my attention. There are some interesting chapters and tidbits, but ultimately the book veers here and there.
May 3, 2020
I heard Casey Schwartz being interviewed on Gretchen Rubin's Happier podcast and I was so taken with her and the topic that I immediately purchased her book and started listening.
I was riveted from the first stories of Schwartz being offered Adderall (her love story) and then continuing to abuse it (sometimes taking it 6 or more times a day) to the point that she was having hospital visits and health repercussions. Her stories about coming off Adderall after being on it for 12 years were very powerful. I started recommending it to everyone that had a connection to ADD or ADHD or Adderall. I thought it held so much promise.
But then it really fizzled. The rest of the book, beyond her personal story is a loose set of stories that I struggled to find connections with her original topic. She writes chapter after chapter about "influential thinkers" including William James, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, David Foster Wallace, Michael Pollock, Simone Wei. She goes to psychedelic conferences and an ayahuasca retreat in South America. For a book "about attention" the book meanders too much. There are too many stories that held only loose connections to attention. Many of the "influential thinkers" she focused on committed suicide. She talks about love as both a distraction from attention and then later as the ultimate "attention". I wish she'd expounded on that a bit more.
She writes with disdain about the evil companies like "Google" that work to win our attention. I'm no more impressed with them as villains than I am with companies whose goal it is to make money. There was some research in the first 3rd about attention, as well as case studies about the efficacy of medications to help with ADD/ ADHD (spoiler alert--the subjects all think that they are much better and clearer, but they cannot perform tasks with more efficiency or speed. Nor do the people around them notice a perceptible difference.)
And lastly, Casey should have gotten a professional narrator. Although her voice has some nice qualities, she takes a downturn at the end of each phrase which felt dragging to me.
I was riveted from the first stories of Schwartz being offered Adderall (her love story) and then continuing to abuse it (sometimes taking it 6 or more times a day) to the point that she was having hospital visits and health repercussions. Her stories about coming off Adderall after being on it for 12 years were very powerful. I started recommending it to everyone that had a connection to ADD or ADHD or Adderall. I thought it held so much promise.
But then it really fizzled. The rest of the book, beyond her personal story is a loose set of stories that I struggled to find connections with her original topic. She writes chapter after chapter about "influential thinkers" including William James, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, David Foster Wallace, Michael Pollock, Simone Wei. She goes to psychedelic conferences and an ayahuasca retreat in South America. For a book "about attention" the book meanders too much. There are too many stories that held only loose connections to attention. Many of the "influential thinkers" she focused on committed suicide. She talks about love as both a distraction from attention and then later as the ultimate "attention". I wish she'd expounded on that a bit more.
She writes with disdain about the evil companies like "Google" that work to win our attention. I'm no more impressed with them as villains than I am with companies whose goal it is to make money. There was some research in the first 3rd about attention, as well as case studies about the efficacy of medications to help with ADD/ ADHD (spoiler alert--the subjects all think that they are much better and clearer, but they cannot perform tasks with more efficiency or speed. Nor do the people around them notice a perceptible difference.)
And lastly, Casey should have gotten a professional narrator. Although her voice has some nice qualities, she takes a downturn at the end of each phrase which felt dragging to me.
July 12, 2020
Ironically, for a book about attention, this book is remarkably unfocused and meandering. It starts off strongly with the author's description of how she became addicted to Adderall, but then doesn't really seem to know what to do with the rest of the book. After reading long, uncritical discussions of David Foster Wallace and Alduous Huxley, I skim-read the rest of the book, trying (unsuccessfully) the find a point. Was it about addiction? Adderall? iPhones? I am still unsure.
The book's absolute low point was the author's discussion of her father's sacking. Apparently, her father's eccentricities (for example, "his radical infirmity, his disdain for bourgeois etiquette, his pleasure in playfulness," *massive eye roll*) were misinterpreted and led to his sacking. Behaviours described by Casey Schwartz, including touching and singing to other men while they were urinating, are just pranks and completely harmless. His workplace didn't even tell him why he was sacked! Her dad was collateral damage for the Me Too revolution. Puh-lease. If anyone honestly believes that Jonathan Schwartz was sacked from an organisation like NPR after 20 years of employment without being told why, I have a bridge and a bag of magic beans to sell you. This chapter did make me understand why so many of these predatory men's families still publicly support them - they just don't believe their dad/uncle/brother/son could do what is being alleged.
The book's absolute low point was the author's discussion of her father's sacking. Apparently, her father's eccentricities (for example, "his radical infirmity, his disdain for bourgeois etiquette, his pleasure in playfulness," *massive eye roll*) were misinterpreted and led to his sacking. Behaviours described by Casey Schwartz, including touching and singing to other men while they were urinating, are just pranks and completely harmless. His workplace didn't even tell him why he was sacked! Her dad was collateral damage for the Me Too revolution. Puh-lease. If anyone honestly believes that Jonathan Schwartz was sacked from an organisation like NPR after 20 years of employment without being told why, I have a bridge and a bag of magic beans to sell you. This chapter did make me understand why so many of these predatory men's families still publicly support them - they just don't believe their dad/uncle/brother/son could do what is being alleged.
April 30, 2020
See the NYT review before buying this book. I wish I had, as it’s spot-on. This is a loose amalgamation of stories without any real point, theme or lesson. The supreme irony of the book is that there is no attention to the subject at hand. It flails around and in the end we’re left with nothing but window dressing.
May 7, 2020
Originally published on my book blog, TheBibliophage.com.
2.5 stars, generously rounded up.
Casey Schwartz writes a memoir and social history mash up in Attention, A Love Story. She’s a thirty-something woman who started using Adderal, a drug to treat ADHD, in college. But she took it without being diagnosed. It’s just one of those things college kids do, right? Then, ten years later, she was still addicted to the focused and invincible way it made her feel. And yet, kicking it also made sense. This memoir is her struggle to pick a side.
Schwartz uses her research skills to find references in literature and history about attention. The ability to pay full attention is what she craves. And she knows she’s not the first person to analyze why it’s so difficult to actually focus intently. So she reaches back into the works of writers like William James, David Foster Wallace, and Simone Weil.
Alternatives to prescription medication, like ayahuasca or psilocybin mushroom, might be an option. And this thinking leads Schwartz to the works of Michael Pollan and Gabor Maté. In fact she interviews the latter and attends a few of his workshops.
As a child of the digital age, she delves into screens and Silicon Valley. No surprise, she discovers that people developing technology don’t like using it. And through it all, Schwartz shares personal experiences from college to career to family.
My conclusions
First and foremost, this is the memoir of a privileged woman. She the daughter of accomplished parents who attends an Ivy League college. And she’s not sure she’s good enough. Hence, the attraction of a boost. It will help her conquer the feeling of inadequacy. But in the end, knowing her focus comes with an addiction outweighs the benefits.
As she writes this book, her primary job is journalism and writing. Both of which pay sporadically and poorly. Yet, Schwartz travels the world in pursuit of attention. As much as her experience and research were interesting, I can’t divorce the book from my feelings about privilege. And Schwartz doesn’t come out on the winning side.
After recently reading the excellent Catch and Kill from Ronan Farrow, Schwartz’s #metoo story fell flat. Farrow chronicles harrowing experiences of sexual assault and harassment. Schwartz discovers that her dad’s long-time career is derailed by vague accusations of impropriety. At least that’s all she shares in her book. Yet she uses that experience as her trauma when attending a Maté workshop. Not equivalent in my view.
However, if you’re curious about Adderal, attention, and alternatives, give Schwartz’s book a try. I readily found a copy on my library’s digital shelves.
Pair with Know My Name for a compelling first-person #metoo story. Or check out Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind for an exploratory journey into hallucinogens for psychological and medicinal use.
Watch a Crowdcast book tour stop with Casey Schwartz on replay.
2.5 stars, generously rounded up.
Casey Schwartz writes a memoir and social history mash up in Attention, A Love Story. She’s a thirty-something woman who started using Adderal, a drug to treat ADHD, in college. But she took it without being diagnosed. It’s just one of those things college kids do, right? Then, ten years later, she was still addicted to the focused and invincible way it made her feel. And yet, kicking it also made sense. This memoir is her struggle to pick a side.
Schwartz uses her research skills to find references in literature and history about attention. The ability to pay full attention is what she craves. And she knows she’s not the first person to analyze why it’s so difficult to actually focus intently. So she reaches back into the works of writers like William James, David Foster Wallace, and Simone Weil.
Alternatives to prescription medication, like ayahuasca or psilocybin mushroom, might be an option. And this thinking leads Schwartz to the works of Michael Pollan and Gabor Maté. In fact she interviews the latter and attends a few of his workshops.
As a child of the digital age, she delves into screens and Silicon Valley. No surprise, she discovers that people developing technology don’t like using it. And through it all, Schwartz shares personal experiences from college to career to family.
My conclusions
First and foremost, this is the memoir of a privileged woman. She the daughter of accomplished parents who attends an Ivy League college. And she’s not sure she’s good enough. Hence, the attraction of a boost. It will help her conquer the feeling of inadequacy. But in the end, knowing her focus comes with an addiction outweighs the benefits.
As she writes this book, her primary job is journalism and writing. Both of which pay sporadically and poorly. Yet, Schwartz travels the world in pursuit of attention. As much as her experience and research were interesting, I can’t divorce the book from my feelings about privilege. And Schwartz doesn’t come out on the winning side.
After recently reading the excellent Catch and Kill from Ronan Farrow, Schwartz’s #metoo story fell flat. Farrow chronicles harrowing experiences of sexual assault and harassment. Schwartz discovers that her dad’s long-time career is derailed by vague accusations of impropriety. At least that’s all she shares in her book. Yet she uses that experience as her trauma when attending a Maté workshop. Not equivalent in my view.
However, if you’re curious about Adderal, attention, and alternatives, give Schwartz’s book a try. I readily found a copy on my library’s digital shelves.
Pair with Know My Name for a compelling first-person #metoo story. Or check out Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind for an exploratory journey into hallucinogens for psychological and medicinal use.
Watch a Crowdcast book tour stop with Casey Schwartz on replay.
July 14, 2023
Casey Schwartz's clear and elegant prose is quickly undermined by subpar "reporting." She bases her assessment of what ADHD actually is on ADHD Nation, without ever speaking to a person with ADHD, calls Adderall legal speed and uncritically quotes a doctor who says Adderall and meth are not meaningfully different. There is a profound difference between the way these things operate in a person's body, especially if a person legitimately has ADHD. Because Schwartz's experience with Adderall is as a person without ADHD who abused the drug, she lambasts it for everyone. For me, I came to it after several other stimulant and non stimulant drugs under proper prescription and care, and was made to go through fairly intensive screening to make sure I actually have ADHD. It's also important to point out that ADHD is not really a deficit of attention, so much as it is an excess of attention that is hard to direct, coupled with problems with executive function and emotional management. For people who actually have ADHD, Adderall can sometimes prevent the emotional overreactions that she experienced abusing the drug. It also isn't habit forming in the way that more addictive substances are. I easily take skip days, both on purpose and on accident, or even skip weeks when I'm ill.
She also interviews Gabor Mate, a trauma therapist who, without any evidence, decided that all ADHD was really trauma. Again - if you think ADHD is just having problems paying attention, you might be confused that many other conditions, including PTSD, are characterized by difficulty paying attention. Mind-wandering is actually a better predictor of the severity of ADHD than other measures of attention.
There may be some value in her meditations on attention, but other authors have done it better and without maligning a vulnerable population.
In summary, one woman abused a drug and wrote a bad book about how no one really needs a drug like this, we need to change society and our expectations around attention, without ever examining her assumptions about ADHD people or getting any conflicting opinions for her very biased doctors. She thinks Addrrall abusers are the victims, not the people who actually need it to show up to work, drive a vehicle safely, and do taxes, etc, and are constantly being misrepresented by people like her.
She also interviews Gabor Mate, a trauma therapist who, without any evidence, decided that all ADHD was really trauma. Again - if you think ADHD is just having problems paying attention, you might be confused that many other conditions, including PTSD, are characterized by difficulty paying attention. Mind-wandering is actually a better predictor of the severity of ADHD than other measures of attention.
There may be some value in her meditations on attention, but other authors have done it better and without maligning a vulnerable population.
In summary, one woman abused a drug and wrote a bad book about how no one really needs a drug like this, we need to change society and our expectations around attention, without ever examining her assumptions about ADHD people or getting any conflicting opinions for her very biased doctors. She thinks Addrrall abusers are the victims, not the people who actually need it to show up to work, drive a vehicle safely, and do taxes, etc, and are constantly being misrepresented by people like her.
June 29, 2020
I feel like this had the potential to be good book, but it was so meandering and unfocused and disorganized that I had a difficult time understanding the author's point in any of it. So many long and pointless tangents. So many stories that have nothing to do with anything. I don't want to be an asshole here, but maybe just take the Adderall. Geez.
May 28, 2020
Interesting. You may learn something, but this book could not keep my attention and it's easy to keep my attention.
February 2, 2023
Wow this was nothing like I thought it would be, and I really liked that about it.
Definitely gained some new insights about attention, focus and addiction.
Genuinely a very satisfying read
Definitely gained some new insights about attention, focus and addiction.
Genuinely a very satisfying read
February 13, 2025
For my friends who may be curious about some of my eccentric Amish-lite tendencies, Schwartz provides a pretty solid primer. To my mind there are basically two different threads in this book, one more or less leading to the other. First: that attention, focus, and presence are vastly underappreciated resources and perhaps our most reliable path to contentment and fulfillment. If one takes that claim as true, it does not take much of a leap to accept the second thread (marginally more of a personal bug-a-boo): that our modern culture is mired in a serious crisis.*
The various Bigs-- Tech and Pharma chief among them-- have promised us liberation from the mundanities and difficulties of life, but have primarily served to deprive us of our patience, self-reliance, and ability to enjoy life on its own terms. These technologies are developed with the explicit goal of making us increasingly dependent upon them-- an individual experiencing simple, unmediated satisfaction in life is the worst-case-scenario financially for these companies. Indeed, the status quo is self-reinforcing. The same people responsible for our constant distraction promise an easy solution to the alienation it has wrought: pop another pill, scroll through some more targeted content.
Quotes included from Silicon Valley insiders, while not exactly breaking any news, are striking nonetheless in their bluntness:
From Google-employee-turned-'Alarm-System' Tristan Harris:
"[Facebook's daily mission is] a game for our attention... making the world more open and connected, or standing up for truth, is not what Facebook's thousands of engineers go to work to do every day."
"There's a whole part of the tech industry called growth hacking, and it's common, and it's basically: How do you engineer growth? And it's basically a psychology manipulation team. So everyone in the industry knows that this is how it works, it's just people in the public that don't know."
"There's a situation we're in which is not really aligned with the human environment, which is to say parent-child relationships, relationships with ourselves, the face time that we need to have with each other and community. We don't have a technology environment that's designed to support those things. It's just move fast and break things, tear it all apart, suck attention out of each of those ecosystems. So when you see it that way as a consumer, you think, oh my god, it really is playing chess against my mind."
From Facebook's former head of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya:
"We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are."
From Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier:
"You let us reinvent your world! I'm still curious why."
Amidst all the doom and gloom, perhaps the bleakest realization is that this book was published in 2020-- in the 5 years since, despite the widespread concern at the time, all we've done is double down on our worst instincts. People are more obsessed and addicted than ever. The people responsible exert ever more control over our lives.
I'll end my rant here and cozy up with my little Calvin Coolidge biography. For the sake of optimism, I'll end on a more uplifting quote, one of the last remarks of focus-focused Aldous Huxley:
"It is never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life."
* left halfway through this review to meet Triple A and jump my car. Finishing now with a flourish.
The various Bigs-- Tech and Pharma chief among them-- have promised us liberation from the mundanities and difficulties of life, but have primarily served to deprive us of our patience, self-reliance, and ability to enjoy life on its own terms. These technologies are developed with the explicit goal of making us increasingly dependent upon them-- an individual experiencing simple, unmediated satisfaction in life is the worst-case-scenario financially for these companies. Indeed, the status quo is self-reinforcing. The same people responsible for our constant distraction promise an easy solution to the alienation it has wrought: pop another pill, scroll through some more targeted content.
Quotes included from Silicon Valley insiders, while not exactly breaking any news, are striking nonetheless in their bluntness:
From Google-employee-turned-'Alarm-System' Tristan Harris:
"[Facebook's daily mission is] a game for our attention... making the world more open and connected, or standing up for truth, is not what Facebook's thousands of engineers go to work to do every day."
"There's a whole part of the tech industry called growth hacking, and it's common, and it's basically: How do you engineer growth? And it's basically a psychology manipulation team. So everyone in the industry knows that this is how it works, it's just people in the public that don't know."
"There's a situation we're in which is not really aligned with the human environment, which is to say parent-child relationships, relationships with ourselves, the face time that we need to have with each other and community. We don't have a technology environment that's designed to support those things. It's just move fast and break things, tear it all apart, suck attention out of each of those ecosystems. So when you see it that way as a consumer, you think, oh my god, it really is playing chess against my mind."
From Facebook's former head of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya:
"We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are."
From Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier:
"You let us reinvent your world! I'm still curious why."
Amidst all the doom and gloom, perhaps the bleakest realization is that this book was published in 2020-- in the 5 years since, despite the widespread concern at the time, all we've done is double down on our worst instincts. People are more obsessed and addicted than ever. The people responsible exert ever more control over our lives.
I'll end my rant here and cozy up with my little Calvin Coolidge biography. For the sake of optimism, I'll end on a more uplifting quote, one of the last remarks of focus-focused Aldous Huxley:
"It is never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life."
* left halfway through this review to meet Triple A and jump my car. Finishing now with a flourish.
June 10, 2020
This book felt like at least 2 distinct stories. The first, taking up the first half of the book, is difficult to label as it was neither gripping nor clear in its direction. With themes of anti-adderall activism and suggestions that ADD and ADHD are simultaneously not totally real and also pathologies, and a running commentary of drug addiction, this part of the book was confusing and it was difficult for me to care.
Around 1/2-3/4 through, though, the writing style changes, becomes both more heartfelt and more cohesive. I cared about the story the last half of the book was telling, even though I still wasn't exactly sure what that story was
Ultimately, this book was one that tried to tell too many stories with not enough cohesion amongst data points or opinion from the author to make it flow.
I listened to the audiobook. I do not recommend, as I found the author's voice grating and lacking in the appropriate flow that would have helped me understand/stay with the book. Other than her LITERAL voice, her stylistic voice was one dripping with unaddressed privilege which continually took me out of the book. I kept feeling like I was being Gooped.
If you were interested in the book, I'd recommend it for some points of beautiful storytelling and an interesting history on attention/technology/the medical field around ADD/ADHD.
But, ultimately I would not personally suggest it to anyone, as there were many salient data points unexplored, a strong suggestion of neuro divergence as a pathology resulting from trauma as opposed to a natural difference in presentation and experience, and a weird story about the author's dad being a victim of #MeToo. I imagine that story could have a place somewhere, and it was important to the author's research that this Big Life Event happened, but it was presented in a slimy way.
Try instead anything by Dan Siegel.
Around 1/2-3/4 through, though, the writing style changes, becomes both more heartfelt and more cohesive. I cared about the story the last half of the book was telling, even though I still wasn't exactly sure what that story was
Ultimately, this book was one that tried to tell too many stories with not enough cohesion amongst data points or opinion from the author to make it flow.
I listened to the audiobook. I do not recommend, as I found the author's voice grating and lacking in the appropriate flow that would have helped me understand/stay with the book. Other than her LITERAL voice, her stylistic voice was one dripping with unaddressed privilege which continually took me out of the book. I kept feeling like I was being Gooped.
If you were interested in the book, I'd recommend it for some points of beautiful storytelling and an interesting history on attention/technology/the medical field around ADD/ADHD.
But, ultimately I would not personally suggest it to anyone, as there were many salient data points unexplored, a strong suggestion of neuro divergence as a pathology resulting from trauma as opposed to a natural difference in presentation and experience, and a weird story about the author's dad being a victim of #MeToo. I imagine that story could have a place somewhere, and it was important to the author's research that this Big Life Event happened, but it was presented in a slimy way.
Try instead anything by Dan Siegel.
September 5, 2021
As someone diagnosed with ADHD and on Adderall this book considers the very things that have not sat right with me about both the diagnosis/state of ADHD and the medication (vague criteria for diagnosis and warping effect of Adderall). A lot of people have pointed out that this book feels disorganized (I agree) but I found the various meandering threads on attention to be useful anyway, particularly the tracking down of various influential living thinkers (most of whom I’ve read…I can imagine it being less engaging without some background)
July 21, 2020
I was disappointed with this book. It meanders from talk of what is ADHD to psychedelic drugs to philosophers views on what it means to pay attention without ever making connections between the various topics. The talk of ADHD is flippant and frankly insulting to those who actually work hard to manage their symptoms everyday. Disjointed and rambling about sums this one up for me.
April 20, 2020
A riveting read! Kept me rapt throughout and made me consider my own curiosity (especially in times of crisis). The Adderall section was what hooked me, but the psychedelics conference section was my personal favorite. I also enjoyed the literary deep dive into the history of how authors have written about attention from William James to Simone Weill to David Foster-Wallace and beyond. Can't recommend highly enough. Changed the way I think.
Read
April 25, 2020Tough to rate. I blasted through this, so obviously I enjoyed it. Toward the beginning, I actually thought it could be a life-changing read. Unfortunately, the author then went down strange paths barely related to the topic at hand. It was all pretty interesting but definitely had the potential to be better.
December 1, 2020
Not what I expected. A bit self indulgent. Didn't finish.
April 4, 2021
Such a frustrating book. I bounced around between giving it 5 stars and 1.
The book had so much potential. I can't think of a more universally relevant topic than attention, for those of us in 2021 who have smartphones and near-constant access to infinite amounts of information. What should you pay attention to? How do you decide? What limits should you circumscribe around your media consumption habits, and WHY?
Casey Schwartz takes a stab at it, and she seems to want to ask the right questions. But geez-louise, could you have been more self-indulgent?
The 5 star parts:
When she writes about what others have to say on the topic. She references Simone Weil, David Foster Wallace, Aldous Huxley - all the obvious lighthouses on this roiling sea of distraction - and digs up insightful quotes and life experiences.
The 1 star parts:
Almost everything else.
There is little rigor to the book, and no effort to bring any sort of through-line. It feels like a rambling blog written by a privileged white woman who can travel the world on a whim, and feels that her observations are important enough for others to pay attention to, simply because they are HER observations and feel insightful to her.
She rambles on endlessly about her pedestrian drug use, her boyfriends, her struggles with writing, her oh-so-difficult trips to Canada and South America and Paris and India and on and on.
Most jarring were her stuttering attempts in the last third of the book to deal with her rich and famous father's run-in with the MeToo movement. Her realization that #MeToo and its "Believe All Women" principle is an idea ripe for misuse (as well as being preemptively unfair to half the human race), only after it affects her father and hits close to home, is almost a parody of un-self-aware wokeness. Titania McGrath would have been proud.
But the entire section about her father has no reason to be in the book. It seems to be there only because the events happened while she was writing it, and she treats the book like an extended personal blog. It serves no narrative purpose, and contributes nothing to the topic of attention.
In the end, read Attention if you want to know what some of the greats thought about attention. And try not to roll your eyes too hard at the irony that a book about attention is more rambling, meandering and unfocused than it has any right to be.
The book had so much potential. I can't think of a more universally relevant topic than attention, for those of us in 2021 who have smartphones and near-constant access to infinite amounts of information. What should you pay attention to? How do you decide? What limits should you circumscribe around your media consumption habits, and WHY?
Casey Schwartz takes a stab at it, and she seems to want to ask the right questions. But geez-louise, could you have been more self-indulgent?
The 5 star parts:
When she writes about what others have to say on the topic. She references Simone Weil, David Foster Wallace, Aldous Huxley - all the obvious lighthouses on this roiling sea of distraction - and digs up insightful quotes and life experiences.
The 1 star parts:
Almost everything else.
There is little rigor to the book, and no effort to bring any sort of through-line. It feels like a rambling blog written by a privileged white woman who can travel the world on a whim, and feels that her observations are important enough for others to pay attention to, simply because they are HER observations and feel insightful to her.
She rambles on endlessly about her pedestrian drug use, her boyfriends, her struggles with writing, her oh-so-difficult trips to Canada and South America and Paris and India and on and on.
Most jarring were her stuttering attempts in the last third of the book to deal with her rich and famous father's run-in with the MeToo movement. Her realization that #MeToo and its "Believe All Women" principle is an idea ripe for misuse (as well as being preemptively unfair to half the human race), only after it affects her father and hits close to home, is almost a parody of un-self-aware wokeness. Titania McGrath would have been proud.
But the entire section about her father has no reason to be in the book. It seems to be there only because the events happened while she was writing it, and she treats the book like an extended personal blog. It serves no narrative purpose, and contributes nothing to the topic of attention.
In the end, read Attention if you want to know what some of the greats thought about attention. And try not to roll your eyes too hard at the irony that a book about attention is more rambling, meandering and unfocused than it has any right to be.
August 18, 2022
I had a hard time paying…attention. I related intensely to the authors desire to better understand attention, but it was more of a memoir than an educational review than I desired.
March 18, 2022
Started so strong I was like omg I'm so ready for this. and then just left me hanging. First 4 chapters are an amazing read. So 5 stars for ch1-4, 2.5 stars for the next 10.
"It was fitting. This was sublime. These afternoons I spent in untrammeled focus, absorbing the complicated ideas in the books in front of me, mastering them, penetrating every inch of their surface with my laser-like comprehension, making them a part of myself. Or rather, what I now thought of as myself which is to say this steely undistractable person who I vastly preferred to the lazier, glitchier person I secretly knew my actual self to be. The one who was subject to fits of lassitude and a tendency to eat too many sweedish fish."
"Aderall seems on the surface of things to fit so well with how life is: speed for the sped up internet age. Indeed as I look back on it, it does not escape me that just as aderall was surging onto the market in the 1990s so was the world wide web, that the two have ascended in American life in perfect lockstep like a disease and a cure made for each other."
"In neurological terms liking something was not the same thing as wanting it. Rather these two sensations emanate from two different places in the brain."
"'This is terrible drug for writers' he said. 'It destroys relationship with the past.'"
"Just another weapon in the armament of bourgeois ambition."
"What Aderall clearly does extremely well is make people think they are doing better and to feel good while they're doing it."
"It was a conversation that depended on being able to remember the fine-grain details of storytelling. The details that float back into your mind as unpredictably as inspiration itself."
"In some sense I suppose Andrew neatly replaced Aderall in my constellation of preoccupations. Instead of investing to the point of obsession in a small round pill, I now transferred the full force of my attention onto him."
"I didn't see that what I was asking was this: Is my natural-born attention possibly enough? Is it going to be enough? Every time I took a pill I was answering no, of course. But even long after I stopped, even as I type these words now I am still asking that same question."
"Because what I know by now after all these nearly identical go-rounds is that Aderall does nothing to enhance my ability to absorb the world, to intuit the essence, to, as Wallace recommends, imagine my way out of my own little predicament and into someone else's. On the contrary, Aderall directly impedes these very goals, erecting tight walls around me, boxing me into smallness, and causing me again and again to entirely miss the point."
"How could my brain really hope to tangle with William James when it had been so thoroughly retexturized by the frequency with which I checked instagram? What was I even looking for there?"
"He required himself to meet every demand. James needed constant challenges and perpetual demands if only to prove that the inner well hadn't run dry." - Robert Richardson, James biographer
"What's more, Crary points out, the newly urgent focus on attention brought an inherently destabilizing realization: if, as was now becoming clear, attention differed so dramatically from one person to the next , if we are each , indeed constantly selecting a narrow slice from an infinity of options, then the illusion of one shared reality is shattered. And where and when could this be more obvious than here and now, as we move through our public spaces while visibly, flagrantly, consumed by the private realities playing out on our screens?"
"We need the right terms if we are to say something meaningful."
"With the election of Donald Trump to the Whitehorse the year before, it had become in some real sense our civic duty to be all the more glued to our phones, assiduously tracing every new headline, every new tweet, so that we might, at the least, bear witness to what was happening to our institutions and values. Tuning out of the endless news cycle, turning away from our screeching screens now bore the stigma of political complacency."
"He was forever refining his gaze, forever expanding what he could see."
"And yet this even too....had the same raucous joyful spirit of a like-minded community seeking refuge within itself, taking a much needed break from the outside world, from the people who did not yet understand."
"I wanted to throw off my own distractedness, self-obsession, and frivolity. I wanted to carry out my days purposefully rather than disappearing into meaningless hours of internet nothingness. Yet I couldn't help but notice that I resisted anything that threatened to really change me."
"Procrastination is our way of avoiding putting attention on a topic." (because of emotional issues with the topic)
"I was here to try to gain some insight of my own into a land so mythologized and satirized I wasn't even sure where, strictly speaking, [Silicon Valley] was located."
"It's an old dynamic, actually, needing and hating the same sublime substance."
"[they] described stories of everyday tragedy: alcoholic parents, addicted or deceased children, outright abuse, or something more subtle, the persistent feeling of not being seen by one's family, not being granted the permission for anything like authenticity."
"'That's not a feeling' Gabor repeated throughout the day, trying to bring them back to basics, to primal experiences of pure emotion: sadness or anger or rage, rather than the more detached interpretations of those emotions such as 'I've been discarded' or 'I'm not good enough'"
"'Trauma is not what happened to you.' he repeated again and again, 'It's what happens inside of you. It's the story you tell yourself about the experience you had.'"
"There was some comfort to be found, it was clear, in the distinction between addiction and dependence. Just a couple of degrees of freedom that she could be grateful for, a tiny bit less guilt."
"I felt as if I were saying 'I'm here to learn, but not to change.'"
"Attention and Intention. What do those words come from? Both come from the word tenere which means to stretch. So when you're paying someone attention you're stretching yourself toward themselves. With intention you are stretching yourself toward some inner purpose."
"It's the attention paradox of all time. We continue to believe the future even while we know what we know: our world is burning. What do you do with the truth you see? What action does attention require?"
"But she was closer to answering her eternal question: what are you going through?"
"...booking passage on trains and plane and then wishing I hadn't. Arriving at my destination only to fantasize about my departure. My behavior, it must be said, often looked like that of a person in search of distraction."
"It was fitting. This was sublime. These afternoons I spent in untrammeled focus, absorbing the complicated ideas in the books in front of me, mastering them, penetrating every inch of their surface with my laser-like comprehension, making them a part of myself. Or rather, what I now thought of as myself which is to say this steely undistractable person who I vastly preferred to the lazier, glitchier person I secretly knew my actual self to be. The one who was subject to fits of lassitude and a tendency to eat too many sweedish fish."
"Aderall seems on the surface of things to fit so well with how life is: speed for the sped up internet age. Indeed as I look back on it, it does not escape me that just as aderall was surging onto the market in the 1990s so was the world wide web, that the two have ascended in American life in perfect lockstep like a disease and a cure made for each other."
"In neurological terms liking something was not the same thing as wanting it. Rather these two sensations emanate from two different places in the brain."
"'This is terrible drug for writers' he said. 'It destroys relationship with the past.'"
"Just another weapon in the armament of bourgeois ambition."
"What Aderall clearly does extremely well is make people think they are doing better and to feel good while they're doing it."
"It was a conversation that depended on being able to remember the fine-grain details of storytelling. The details that float back into your mind as unpredictably as inspiration itself."
"In some sense I suppose Andrew neatly replaced Aderall in my constellation of preoccupations. Instead of investing to the point of obsession in a small round pill, I now transferred the full force of my attention onto him."
"I didn't see that what I was asking was this: Is my natural-born attention possibly enough? Is it going to be enough? Every time I took a pill I was answering no, of course. But even long after I stopped, even as I type these words now I am still asking that same question."
"Because what I know by now after all these nearly identical go-rounds is that Aderall does nothing to enhance my ability to absorb the world, to intuit the essence, to, as Wallace recommends, imagine my way out of my own little predicament and into someone else's. On the contrary, Aderall directly impedes these very goals, erecting tight walls around me, boxing me into smallness, and causing me again and again to entirely miss the point."
"How could my brain really hope to tangle with William James when it had been so thoroughly retexturized by the frequency with which I checked instagram? What was I even looking for there?"
"He required himself to meet every demand. James needed constant challenges and perpetual demands if only to prove that the inner well hadn't run dry." - Robert Richardson, James biographer
"What's more, Crary points out, the newly urgent focus on attention brought an inherently destabilizing realization: if, as was now becoming clear, attention differed so dramatically from one person to the next , if we are each , indeed constantly selecting a narrow slice from an infinity of options, then the illusion of one shared reality is shattered. And where and when could this be more obvious than here and now, as we move through our public spaces while visibly, flagrantly, consumed by the private realities playing out on our screens?"
"We need the right terms if we are to say something meaningful."
"With the election of Donald Trump to the Whitehorse the year before, it had become in some real sense our civic duty to be all the more glued to our phones, assiduously tracing every new headline, every new tweet, so that we might, at the least, bear witness to what was happening to our institutions and values. Tuning out of the endless news cycle, turning away from our screeching screens now bore the stigma of political complacency."
"He was forever refining his gaze, forever expanding what he could see."
"And yet this even too....had the same raucous joyful spirit of a like-minded community seeking refuge within itself, taking a much needed break from the outside world, from the people who did not yet understand."
"I wanted to throw off my own distractedness, self-obsession, and frivolity. I wanted to carry out my days purposefully rather than disappearing into meaningless hours of internet nothingness. Yet I couldn't help but notice that I resisted anything that threatened to really change me."
"Procrastination is our way of avoiding putting attention on a topic." (because of emotional issues with the topic)
"I was here to try to gain some insight of my own into a land so mythologized and satirized I wasn't even sure where, strictly speaking, [Silicon Valley] was located."
"It's an old dynamic, actually, needing and hating the same sublime substance."
"[they] described stories of everyday tragedy: alcoholic parents, addicted or deceased children, outright abuse, or something more subtle, the persistent feeling of not being seen by one's family, not being granted the permission for anything like authenticity."
"'That's not a feeling' Gabor repeated throughout the day, trying to bring them back to basics, to primal experiences of pure emotion: sadness or anger or rage, rather than the more detached interpretations of those emotions such as 'I've been discarded' or 'I'm not good enough'"
"'Trauma is not what happened to you.' he repeated again and again, 'It's what happens inside of you. It's the story you tell yourself about the experience you had.'"
"There was some comfort to be found, it was clear, in the distinction between addiction and dependence. Just a couple of degrees of freedom that she could be grateful for, a tiny bit less guilt."
"I felt as if I were saying 'I'm here to learn, but not to change.'"
"Attention and Intention. What do those words come from? Both come from the word tenere which means to stretch. So when you're paying someone attention you're stretching yourself toward themselves. With intention you are stretching yourself toward some inner purpose."
"It's the attention paradox of all time. We continue to believe the future even while we know what we know: our world is burning. What do you do with the truth you see? What action does attention require?"
"But she was closer to answering her eternal question: what are you going through?"
"...booking passage on trains and plane and then wishing I hadn't. Arriving at my destination only to fantasize about my departure. My behavior, it must be said, often looked like that of a person in search of distraction."
April 22, 2020
Thoughtful, personal, and beautifully written
I have enjoyed Schwartz’s writing in the Times over the years, so I eagerly picked up this book. She has enough space here to tell her story. It is full of rich, personal details, including the self-doubt this is often filtered out even from first-person reporting. In reading a book on attention, which often refers to the triggers of modern life, from Instagram to Twitter and even old fashioned email, I was surprised that I never once was tempted to slide out of the Kindle app to ‘just see’ what was happening elsewhere. Schwartz’s narrative is gripping and led me to abandon other reading for the pleasure afforded by more of her story. Schwartz creates the flow state that all readers deserve.
I have enjoyed Schwartz’s writing in the Times over the years, so I eagerly picked up this book. She has enough space here to tell her story. It is full of rich, personal details, including the self-doubt this is often filtered out even from first-person reporting. In reading a book on attention, which often refers to the triggers of modern life, from Instagram to Twitter and even old fashioned email, I was surprised that I never once was tempted to slide out of the Kindle app to ‘just see’ what was happening elsewhere. Schwartz’s narrative is gripping and led me to abandon other reading for the pleasure afforded by more of her story. Schwartz creates the flow state that all readers deserve.
April 2, 2022
I'm surprised this book has such a low average rating because it definitely worked for me. I can see why people might say it went in a lot of different directions but I think the author did a pretty good job tying them all together. A lot of ideas in this book will be on my mind for a long time. Only the first quarter of this book reads like a memoir, which might be another reason people didn't like it; I do wish we had been able to see more detail there, it made me think it would be a good premise for a novel where you could really see under the surface emotionally. But that wasn't the book she wanted to write! Like I said, this worked for me.
May 30, 2024
An interesting memoir, felt like a bit of a diary ramble at times, however, I enjoyed the ride. Author’s writing style is fun to read. I didn’t learn a ton however the ayuhascha portion of it was very interesting to me
July 10, 2020
In this book, the author investigates the concept of attention and our relationship with it in the 21st century, drawing from her personal experience with Adderall addiction. The book touches on many aspects of attention from its historical roots in the writing of William James, conceptualisation in modern-day cognitive neuroscience, treatment by writers like Aldous Huxley and David Foster Wallace, thoughts by philosophers like Simone Weil, and contextualisation by neo-psychoanalysts like Gabor Maté. A large part is dedicated to the cultural discomfort with attention, namely the effort to control and medicalise attention with pharmaceuticals and the fight for our attention in the face of ever-present technological distraction. The author relays her personal feelings on these matters drawing from her experience of Adderall addiction. I liked that this did not fall in the usual black-and-white depiction or doomsday visions of scattered minds in the 21st century, but was a more nuanced reflection on her feelings that likely reflect how many contemporaries experience it. The personal style also made the book very readable. It felt a bit like reading a personal journal of someone who is not only knowledge, but also reflective, honest, and supremely sharp. However, the book also felt, like its subject, elusive and a bit scattered. The book was touching on a lot of aspects of attention but never delved deep enough into any topic for my liking. It’s more of a collection of thoughts on attention. Fortunately, there are plenty of references to get deeper into each topic. It is certainly a new kind of non-fiction book that mixes autobiography with the factual content, which makes even seemingly dry subjects like attention relatable. Perhaps, this itself if emblematic of our modern relationship with attention.
July 2, 2020
I was glad I read this mix of memoir and research. Casey Schwartz wanted to pay attention better--don't we all? Starting with borrowing a friend's Adderall, then getting a prescription of her own, through her own experiences with a number of substances and journalistic investigation into how they work, Schwartz's book is both a personal journey and an inquiry into what it means to pay attention. I left feeling like the Holy Grail of attention is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow," and any other level of focus or concentration is somehow less than, hence, Schwartz's, and others' search for better ways to pay attention. I don't know, though, that we humans are designed like that, and it's not just because we now have all those devices. Don't different tasks take different concentration styles? Not everything can be, building a block tower with your kids, or watching a no-hitter live at the ballpark (an experience I am still awaiting), or that 45 minutes in the classroom where suddenly there's that perfect mesh between what you bring as a teacher and what your students bring as learners and the whole reading/writing/speaking/listening hour becomes effortless. Sometimes isn't it just effortful, one foot in front of the other, and you know you're far from getting everything--or even anything--out of the experience? I started the book with the question, what do we mean when we say we pay, or can't pay, attention,and I ended with it, too. But maybe I was just having trouble paying attention...
June 1, 2025
“‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.’ … To pay attention is to believe there is something worth paying attention to. Even if you don’t yet know of what it consists. Even if it hasn’t been preselected by an algorithm to play your interests. Even if it might hurt or disappoint you, scandalize you with its sensibility, or defy you entirely. Still, blindly, you devote yourself.”
“The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.”
Schwartz (Brown alum!!) takes us through her own personal journey with attention and gives a cohesive summary of the modern writers of attention. Somehow we end up talking about hallucinatory drugs. But she also ponders good questions like what is attention, is there a point to attention, are we ever going to get attention back, to what extent should we pay attention, how much does attention matter.
Mostly appreciate how she introduced famous writers and examined their views on attention in easily digestible way.
Particularly liked Simone Weil, who said the above quotes and also this:
“‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ … with one sentence, Weil elevated attention outside of the self, raising the stakes to nothing less than how we treat each other.”
Also Mary Oliver’s Praying.
“The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.”
Schwartz (Brown alum!!) takes us through her own personal journey with attention and gives a cohesive summary of the modern writers of attention. Somehow we end up talking about hallucinatory drugs. But she also ponders good questions like what is attention, is there a point to attention, are we ever going to get attention back, to what extent should we pay attention, how much does attention matter.
Mostly appreciate how she introduced famous writers and examined their views on attention in easily digestible way.
Particularly liked Simone Weil, who said the above quotes and also this:
“‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ … with one sentence, Weil elevated attention outside of the self, raising the stakes to nothing less than how we treat each other.”
Also Mary Oliver’s Praying.
October 23, 2021
Schwartz recounts her personal story on how to attain focus. She became addicted to Adderall to help her pay attention for a decade. She described how she thought it helped her with her school-work and recounted the role of attention in our lives. She explores attention as it was thought by David Foster Wallace, Simone Weil, Aldous Huxley and William James. She consults with psychedelic researcher Dr Gabor Mate and Silicon Valley consultants.
Schwartz explores how screen time and people’s dependence on them has hacked our attention. Her discussion of her addiction with Adderall and how easy it was to get the pills, explored how the Attention economy has taken over our society without even true diagnosis. She explains with candor how the Adderall kept her from being her “real” self. Adderall is meant for people with ADHD who need it to function in their daily lives and not for people who are overachievers or like her who shouldn’t take it in the first place and can become addicted. This book does not explain the neural deficiencies that cause ADHD as I had expected or more depth in the subject. It was more a personal story of her experiences and an inquiry about what it means to pay attention in a world full of distractions.
Schwartz explores how screen time and people’s dependence on them has hacked our attention. Her discussion of her addiction with Adderall and how easy it was to get the pills, explored how the Attention economy has taken over our society without even true diagnosis. She explains with candor how the Adderall kept her from being her “real” self. Adderall is meant for people with ADHD who need it to function in their daily lives and not for people who are overachievers or like her who shouldn’t take it in the first place and can become addicted. This book does not explain the neural deficiencies that cause ADHD as I had expected or more depth in the subject. It was more a personal story of her experiences and an inquiry about what it means to pay attention in a world full of distractions.
July 27, 2023
This book did not provide the payoff I was looking for. I greatly enjoyed the first few chapters, detailing the author's struggle with addiction, but the rest of the book was meandering. I did not finish the book with a sense of the author's "transformative" experience, which she claims to have had from conducting her research. The last few chapters, which focused on the author's personal account with her father and the "Me Too" movement, were particularly off-putting. It felt a bit out of place as constructed. I understood the idea of inherited trauma as a drive towards distraction, but this...like other ideas...were merely floated and not elaborated upon, which gave me as a reader the sense that the author didn't have a good grasp of the concepts of which she was exploring, even at the end of her journey.
December 9, 2020
I wanted to like this book. I so enjoyed the beginning which describes her journey with her addiction to adderal. It would have been a much better book if she just stuck to the topic of attention and addiction. Instead, the book is all over the place; going off topic with her journey to an ayahuasca retreat (which she doesn’t even end up participating in) and the pity party of her father being laid off in the throes of the me too movement. So many times she almost had my attention didn’t bring her point full circle. I kept waiting for her to bring all these topics and stories together to come to a resolution but it never came. Disappointing.
May 25, 2023
Extraordinary first section (which can be found, essentially reprinted, in the New York Times article titled “Generation Adderall”). Relatively interesting second section. Third section was totally rambly and ironically might not interest a more focused reader (or, at least, someone who craves a concluson). Nonetheless, I personally enjoyed it and didn’t mind the rabbit-holing as I empathized with Schwartz’s perspective and I appreciated her style of writing. I wouldn’t necessarily know who to recommend this book to, but overall, I enjoyed it. I also came away with a list of further book recommendations, which was a plus.
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