Each morning, I scroll through the emails that have collected overnight like the carcasses of moths at dawn.
Today, one headline caught my attention: “Rewilding Your Attention”
I sipped my coffee and skimmed the article, getting more glued to it by the second.
That feeling of little hairs prickling up, of a surge of “oh my god yes” energy inside your chest? I was feeling it.
For the last few years, I’ve written constantly about the idea of “adding more ingredients to your pantry.”
When you feel stuck, directionless, and unexcited about tomorrow—I can guarantee that you have an empty pantry. Meaning, your heart feels narrow because the variety of new inputs in your life has slowed to a trickle. Metaphorically, you won’t bake any exciting cakes until you start filling your life up with zesty, exotic ingredients.
The pandemic made many of us fold inside ourselves and fold inside our homes. The diversity and juiciness of unexpected experiences withered in our lives.
But then we were all let out again, like field mice escaping a winter burrow.
Except in the intervening years, we’d lost the habit of tangling with the new and tipping into the wild, largely because social media and the Internet had combed through our interests with a fine-toothed comb and winnowed down what we’re exposed to to an insulated, isolating algorithmic perfection.
We find our attention trapped in a circular merry-go-round of interests, mostly fed to us by profit-maximizing corporations.
Hence our need to break out of our corporate billionaire fenced-in pens and rewild our attention.
As Clive Thompson, the article’s author, wrote:
What precisely is rewilding one’s attention? It’s about spending less time clicking on stuff that big-tech algorithms push in our direction — and more time cultivating a weirder, more idiosyncratic media landscape.
If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence. [snip]
Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.
Yes yes! I was practically fist-pumping the air after reading this.
Some of you remember my occasional “30 Things I Did This Year” roundup emails.
What’s important to me in this list is not so much the accomplishments themselves, but the diversity of experiences I’ve exposed myself to.
I want to keep myself wild. I want to keep information and ideas flowing into me from streams and rivers I never even knew existed.
Every year, I purposely plan to do some very weird things that I either have no knowledge about or have never done before.
Last year, I went to an enormous UFO convention and sat through discussions of alien encounters, Big Foot, and Pleiadians. And went to an Alien Abductee Support Group meeting.
I traipsed through a Viking Faire where I was persuaded to buy (and wear) a leather Viking breastplate and faux fur cape.
I went to a Krampus Christmas parade filled with goulish 10-foot-tall puppets and a myriad of creepy European folklore characters.
(Metaphorically, my pantry got topped off with the equivalent of miso, cinnamon, and saltines. Not the right ingredients to bake a cake with yet, so I must keep adding.)
Recently, I went to a business conference for millionaires who are scaling their companies to eight-figures. Importantly, the people there owned things like plumbing companies, home health care services, architectural firms and basically, very, very normal businesses.
When they asked me what I did, I had to literally explain it in detail and they still looked at me like I was a kooky-dooky, fish out of water. Which I was.
But it was perfect, because without anyone else there from the personal growth or wellness professions, I got to peek into vastly different business models and practices that broke me out of my own insular thinking.
On my lineup this year, I’ll be attending a Twin Peaks dress-up party. (I’m Nadine, not the Log Lady as you might expect.)
I’ll be seeing Jeff Bridges live in a screen of the Big Lebowski, and I expect (demand!) that half the audience be dressed up as Donny or a purple-pant-suited Jesus.
I’m considering a quick trip to Yellowstone to take a peek at that simmering volcano.
You get the idea.
As for online activities, I have so many Audible credits stacked up that I can afford to poke into new reading, such as a romance novel. (I haven’t read a romance in at least 20 years. Got any recommendations?)
Thompon’s article clued me in on this wonderful site “Weird Old Book Finder” that randomly selects old (pre 1928) book on any topic you type in. I typed in “mediumship” and up popped a 1900 book purporting to tell me how to hold seances. I’m just glittering with excitement, as you can imagine!
So my question to you is that if feel the same urge to rewild your attention, what will you do to cultivate it?
What weird, funky, outside-your-algorithm experiences will you search for?
What new niche publications or blogs will you start reading? What conferences will you go to? What sport will you try out?
Where attention goes, energy flows.
It might be time to paint your life with pink and green polkadots and see what this new, delicious, unfamiliar tub of rewilded attention brings you.
I have high hopes.
Please leave me your thoughts in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
