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Comment by kixiQu | Hacker News Reader

You know who wrote a ton about attention in the past?

Monks.

Reading about how medieval monks conceived of attention and distraction in both functional and spiritual contexts is useful to ground the conversation in how technology (here, often literacy) impacts our ability to do what we mean to do. It is a lot easier (given more generally available/palatable sources) to begin the conversation at the dawn of the modern, but we really shouldn't!

(I'll bet you there's good stuff outside European/Western history, too, I just happen to know the Christian monastic stuff)

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In yoga philosophy, the yoga sutras specifically, the idea of “ekagraha” , or one pointed concentration is very important. Some commentators also promote the idea of not being distracted in the beginning by residing in a remote place (a meadow, a hut or cave) usually under the tutelage of a master (guru)

I think hermits in christianity did much the same.

Daoism also has good remarks, but I am not qualified to speak on that.

There's an interesting variant: older Christian denominations emphasize communion, which means you can go off into the wilderness ("the green martyrdom"), but there's also pressure to be close enough to a priest to celebrate Mass at some interval. This led to the buck-wild phenomenon of the anchoritic life, where you would get a tiny little prison cell built onto the side of a church with a little window in the church wall so you could take communion, and then... live there. Julian of Norwich is my favorite (everyone's favorite?) if you want to look anything up; people from the town would go talk to her at a window on the outside side and she'd give counsel and pray for people and such. https://julianofnorwich.org/pages/who-is-julian-of-norwich

Can you recommend any literature or resources related to Christian monastic thinking on cultivating attention?

Hmm. I would say that the things to look up are the midday demon - you will see that later writings psychologize "acedia" more (another useful term; sort of represents executive dysfunction, though often especially the kind you get from depression), but I think it's fascinating to read those earliest writings that are portraying distraction as this external force that acts upon you. In this genre: the advice given to monks on how to stay focused, at work or at prayer. Re: work, copyists' complaints particularly have interesting analogical merit. Re: prayer, "lectio divina boredom" might be a good rabbit hole to go down.

One day I confessed a few sins to a very, very young priest, and he immediately discerned that I suffer from acedia. I'd never even heard of it, but he recommended a book for me to read, which I devoured. And it turns out that acedia is truly a rampant scourge of the modern world that is barely recognized for what it is.

You know how when you're sick but you have no diagnosis, it's difficult to treat or heal from it? Yeah, that's how it is spiritually. If you don't know the root causes or motivations for your sinful ways, you can't escape them and you're still in slavery.

So once I identified acedia (and it's a slippery, amorphous, insidious malady) I was able to make great progress along the path. In fact, God granted me the graces of self-knowledge and introspection so that I could further discern my identit, my vocation, and my destiny.

Yep so if you're doomscrolling your smartphone all day, or if you're addicted to Netflix/YouTube, you're probably suffering from acedia just as much as the French loved their absinthe and opium. Get diagnosed and get some help from above!

What a perceptive priest! Makes me kind of wish we Episcopalians had a routine around one-on-one confession - we have a rite of confession ("Reconciliation of a Penitent") in our prayer book, and any good priest would be happy to accommodate that request, but we don't have the physical (confession booths) or temporal ("Father So-and-So hears confessions every Saturday from 10-12") structures that put the idea into someone's head for "minor" sins.

However, at every worship service, we communally recite a confession of sins, and the phrase "and left undone" usually jiggles a couple things loose that, indeed, I have failed to do, to the usually slight but compounding detriment of my family or my colleagues - in other words, small (but compounding) sins of omission.

Unfortunately, I'd feel rather impolite pulling out a notepad or my phone to jot that down, and I've usually forgotten what it was by the time church lets out... (edited to add) but I could discreetly jot it down on the service leaflet.

And now I've looked up "acedia," and would love to know the title or author of that book your priest had you read.

https://www.amazon.com/Noonday-Devil-Acedia-Unnamed-Times/dp...

This sounds interesting. Do you have any reading suggestions?

The Cloud of Unknowing is my favorite monkly advice, though possibly because it's been given a very nice modern English translation (other stuff might be just as good if treated with as much interpretive freedom?). While you'll find immediately that it's talking about attention during prayer, the way distraction is discussed is still really generally useful. Some excerpts here: https://www.theculturium.com/the-cloud-of-unknowing/#attachm...

Thomas Aquinas talked about attention/boredom, I think, but I can't read him unless I'm in a very particular mindset so I don't have much to cite you.

Hm. I looked a bit at some different stuff but the problem is that I can't really recommend e.g. [The Imitation of Christ](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_the_Imitation_of_Christ) unless you're really looking to spend a while with medieval Christianity for its own sake, with the treatment of attention sort of incidental. I will think more and come back to this comment thread if I come up with a better rec. (I'll also note that a tragic portion of this stuff is dead-tree-only)

https://librivox.org/the-imitation-of-christ-by-thomas-a-kem...

A priest friend recommended Thomas a Kempis to me, and I enjoyed listening to this audiobook version. Yes, it's not for the agnostics or the faint of heart, but it is an amazing explication of what it means to be a faithful layman and follower of Jesus.

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