I’m a big fan of Adam Robbert and love his framing of attention as the first philosophy. A few snippets from his recent talk:

1. Attention is the practice beneath all philosophical practices. Nearly every contemplative tradition—Stoic, Platonic, Christian monastic—was built on attention as the foundational practice. Practices like fasting, physical training, and meditation exist to guard the stillness attention requires. Philosophy, in this sense, is a discipline of perception, not mere argumentation.

2. Distraction is a perennial human problem, not a modern pathology. Medieval monks complained that illuminated manuscripts were too decorative and distracting from the text. Socrates bemoaned writing as a technology that would erode our memory. But now, we accept writing as part of the intellectual life. The shape of the distraction changes, but the underlying dynamic doesn’t.

3. Human memory is an ecosystem that must be tended to. Human memory doesn’t store files like a computer, but reorganizes perception at the level of physical sensation. What you attend to shapes your memory, and how reality shows up to you. Writer Eleanor Robins offers a metaphor: your memory is like a garden that you must fertilize with rich material; overconsumption of flat, repetitive media leads to the “desertification” of the inner life.