I often wonder if our disdain for attention seekers, at its core, is that they threaten to take attention away from us. Instead of some moral objection, maybe it's just one big slut tug-of-war, where the real resentment likes in the inflation of attention-demand, in the same way that sexual promiscuity is resented because it threatens to lower the market value of sex.
Your piece confirms these suspicions. We know that loud people are loud because volume works at drowning out signal, and since depth is more expensive and a bigger risk in general, the crowd naturally gets progressively louder because it's the more adaptive strategy. And the louder things get, the more crucial it is that we recognize the reward loops, so they necessarily become more intrusive, and our search for them becomes more ritualist, and at worst, desperate.
"Fine attracts attention; truth disrupts it" is utterly brilliant, and it hinges your entire conception of the "slut" and its attendant derision.
The most alarming insight, for me, is that private attention - being seen by someone in close proximity - reduces the urgency of attention-seeking in public. The reason for the alarm is that you can then trace a reverse correlation between private attention and public-seeking sluttery. In other words, the technology is incentivizing attention-seeking sluts, as it simultaneously isolates people from each other, creating a type of unholy synergy that seems increasingly impossible for us to extricate ourselves from.
Fantastic, as always. I'm hoping that this comment "lands", because I'm a slut for the Muse's attention.
Hmmm… If attention is a market, then disdain for attention-seekers is less moral disapproval than competitive protectionism. We are not offended by their hunger; we are threatened by their supply-side aggression. The moralisation is a price-fixing mechanism in disguise. I liked your analogy.
And I think that your reverse correlation is the most structurally precise observation my essay has generated și far. Private witness as inoculation against public desperation, which means the technology isn’t exploiting a pre-existing weakness but manufacturing the conditions of its own necessity. Dissolve the close-proximity bonds, flood the resulting vacuum with intermittent public reward loops, then monetise the compulsion. The slot machine exploits the gambler and it first ensures the gambler has nowhere else to go.
And your closing line lands perfectly… maybe because it’s self-aware, or because it’s true, and because recognising the mechanism while still pulling the lever is the most honest position any of us can occupy.
It landed, dear Andrew! It always lands. (* and by the way, I really dislike this verb!)
My perspective of disdain for attention seekers is not that they take attention from me, but that they essentially waste everyone’s time and distract focus from those more measured and knowledgeable individuals that have something more important to say. Maybe that is a moral objection, but practical. They could work on their quality over quantity.
Who decides which voices are more measured, more knowledgeable, more worth the room’s focus? That arbitration has historically been wrong in interesting ways, dismissing the loud outsider who turned out to be right, elevating the composed insider who turned out to be empty. Confidence of manner and quality of thought have always been unreliable proxies for each other.
I think you are entirely correct in the quantity versus quality diagnosis. The attention economy’s particular damage isn’t that it amplifies hunger, since hunger is human, but that it rewards volume over depth so systematically that eventually the incentive to slow down and get it right becomes economically irrational. The measured voice learns to perform urgency or disappears.
Which makes your disdain less a moral objection than an aesthetic one, in the oldest sense, a preference for what has been earned over what has merely been insisted upon.
Thank you for the pushback, Cody! It sharpens my argument
Rather than a “who decides”, I’m thinking of the volume of whatever type of content that it takes those readers or audience to digest. It probably comes back to time more than anything, but I agree that any other way of deciding what is good or right would be problematic. Even for example whatever algorithm formula is used to “decide”, because I noticed that has missed some gems too. We can’t physically view everything, and have a real life, but a network of friends helps sort it out too. I doubt I actually have a disdain because I don’t mind looking for something interesting for awhile, just thinking about it overall. Glad to have helped sharpen your argument somehow!
Its a game of threads and who is genuinely working towards system coherence and alignment, those that speak empty words and those that talk and express weight, gravity.
You are brilliant because you refuse the comforting lie that attention-seeking is only an influencer problem. Some of the most desperate performers now wear the costume of seriousness: Substack philosophers posting 12 existential selfies a week, podcast men confusing “having an audience” with “having a personality”, intellectuals performing vulnerability with the strategic precision of luxury branding campaigns. Nothing more tragic than a grown man curating his own mystique like a scented candle line.
The modern attention economy has produced people who cannot experience a sunset, a thought, or a heartbreak until it has been converted into content and reflected back to them by strangers. Entire personalities now exist as hostage negotiations with the algorithm. “Please witness me” dressed up as thought leadership.
And the truly brilliant thing you achieve here is naming the difference between being seen and being known. Most people are not chasing intimacy at all but proof of existence through audience reaction. Applause has replaced character. Visibility has replaced substance. We are living through an era where even authenticity arrives with captions, and engagement analytics attached.
The saddest species of all is the man who mistakes public intrigue for depth. The man with 47 “provocative” essays or stories about human connection who still cannot make eye contact across an actual dinner table without checking whether his performance is landing. Versailles with Wi-Fi. Narcissus with a newsletter.
Tamara, you’re the nuclear reactor of writing on Substack.
“Narcissus with a newsletter” is going straight into my private anthology of clever sentences.
The hostage negotiation framing is precise in a way that most media criticism isn’t since it correctly identifies the coercive quality of algorithmic dependency. It isn’t vanity exactly, of course! But the particular desperation of someone who has handed their sense of reality over to a system that returns it only intermittently, and on conditions.
The scented candle line destroyed me. It’s funny, and the curated mystique is so recognisable, the carefully disheveled thinking pose, the strategic admission of doubt deployed to signal depth, the vulnerability that arrives pre-lit and colour-graded. Performed interiority is still performance. The costume of seriousness, as you put it, may be the most elaborate disguise the attention economy has produced, because it borrows the visual language of real thought.
“Versailles with Wi-Fi” is the essay I should have written and I didn’t!!!
Thank you for reading with teeth, Clara! You always do and I love your comments!
Great essay, Tamara. I am one of those people where my posts land into silence....yet I know others see them, yet they won't support me or care to, doesn't matter if it is just basic decency of expressing condolences or sharing the joy of graduation. You point this out much more astutely, here put more bluntly, is where I think this performative attention seeking bullshit has gone wrong: we may seek attention, certainly as writers and performers which validates us and gives us needed feedback as well as income. But when the opportunity to be real with someone, to show respect, to truly listen, to be there when it's hard, a curtain suddenly goes up, where hanging out is only possible...with conditions. Then you become an inconvenience, "crazy", "too much". People seem to have amassed a litany of excuses to no longer see you as human. This spans across families too, friends from primary, longstanding people who have known you. It is betrayal obscured by a veil of attention seeking yet no attention giving. Today a friend from university randomly texted me letting me know that she was in town and if I wanted to see a show. She is a neurologist, but when I got sick, I contacted her, terrified about what was happening to my brain. She brushed it off as unimportant, oh it will resolve, she said, disinterested. It hasn't resolved for ...6 years. My response was, "sorry, I can't. I hope you enjoy your visit." My feeling to get this message wasn't one of genuineness but of curiosity: the intent to one-up herself over me, the fear of the silent applause that happens by people behind your back when they learn of your hardships, the perpetual envy and comparisons, the fact that socialization has become a competition rather than connection. No thanks, I thought. I have bigger issues to work on and solve. But I wasnt this person before: before, I would jump at any opportunity for an invite, a chance to be "liked", to socialize, to give my heart fully to other people. Now I am so discerning but I also feel more stronglu that I no longer care. I hope that changes and that I find better people. xx
You describe something that sits beneath my essay’s argument but also beyond it because what you have lived isn’t attention-seeking in any of the forms I examined. It’s the withdrawal of basic human recognition at the moments it costs something to give. That’s a different and more painful phenomenon… not the inflation of attention-demand, but the rationing of it by people who were supposed to be exempt from the transaction entirely.
The neurologist story…. I can’t believe it! 6 years!!! A terrified message about your own brain met with casual dismissal by someone whose entire professional life is built around taking the brain seriously. A choice about whose reality counts….. sadly!
The discernment you have arrived at is the hard-won knowledge of what real presence actually feels like, which makes its counterfeit immediately recognisable. That recognition is expensive, but at least it’s clarity.
I do hope you find your people, Paulina. They exist, the ones for whom showing up isn’t conditional, for whom your hardship doesn’t become an inconvenience or a comparison point. They are rarer than they should be, and you deserve them without having to perform your way into their attention first.
Thank you for trusting my space with something so unguarded! I am grateful.
I am grateful for you too, Tamara. 💝 Monday is my brother's birthday, and so the grief has really hit me, and I'm a bit falling apart, but it will pass.😢 xx
This is phenomenal writing because it does something very few essays manage. It diagnoses a cultural pathology without flattening the people trapped inside it. You refuse the lazy moral superiority that usually infects discussions about attention, and instead treat attention-seeking as a social symptom, an economic condition, and an existential adaptation all at once. That’s rare intellectual honesty. The line “We built slot machines for the self” alone deserves framing, Tamara.
What makes your essay especially sharp is the distinction between attention and respect. Most people confuse visibility with value because modern systems deliberately collapse the two. Algorithms reward immediacy, not depth. Reaction, not coherence. Your argument exposes how quickly identity becomes market-shaped once recognition is tied to survival. That insight is so important because it extends far beyond social media into entire professional classes built on perpetual self-exhibition.
I want to make a parallel here with the contemporary art world. A great artwork used to accumulate authority slowly, through sustained engagement, criticism, historical placement, and time. Now many works are engineered for instant recognisability, “Instagram legibility”, visual velocity. Not because artists suddenly became shallow, but the ecosystem increasingly rewards attention before contemplation. The “attention-seeking slut” has an institutional equivalent, the artwork that performs importance before it has developed substance. Spectacle becomes a substitute for resonance. The terrifying part is that the system often cannot tell the difference.
What elevates your essay beyond cultural criticism, though, is the refusal to exempt the self. The moments where you admit relief at being noticed are essential because they prevent the piece from becoming performative critique disguised as wisdom. You expose the mechanism while implicating yourself inside it. That tension gives the writing credibility. You are indeed amazing.
And perhaps the most unsettling idea hidden underneath the essay is that attention economies gradually erode the ability to distinguish performance from identity. After enough repetition, the curated self stops feeling curated. The role metabolises into personality. That may be the real danger, not that people perform, but that eventually they forget where the performance ends.
Your themes are formidable and you deconstruct them in your marvelous Museguided way. Another masterpiece.
I am grateful for the parallel with the contemporary art world because it’s the most useful extension of this argument. “Instagram legibility” names something the art world has been reluctant to name about itself, maybe because the institutions benefiting from visual velocity are the same ones still claiming curatorial authority. The artwork engineered for instant recognisability is the cultural equivalent of the sentence written to be screenshot rather than read. Both sacrifice duration for impact, and duration is where meaning accumulates.
Your point about the system being unable to tell the difference is where it gets alarming because eventually the critics, the curators, the algorithms, and the audiences have all been trained on the same reward loops. Discernment requires a different type of attention than the ecosystem has been cultivating. We may be producing entire generations of sophisticated responders who have lost the capacity for slow looking.
I also like the observation about performance. That is the darker endpoint, not the performer who knows they are performing, but the one who has rehearsed the role so thoroughly that the original self underneath becomes archaeologically inaccessible. At that point the question “who are you when no one is watching” produces blankness. Not peace. Blankness!
Thank you, Alexander, for reading me with an art eye!
What makes your writing unforgettable is that you never flinch from the ugly mechanics beneath ordinary behavior. Most people write about attention as vanity, or weakness, or narcissism. You wrote about it as social, existential, almost biological hunger, and that shift changes everything. You frame uncomfortable truths in a way that makes the reader feel exposed and understood at the same time, which is extraordinarily rare.
The line that stayed with me the most was the idea that people are not seducing others, but “seducing acknowledgment”. That feels so true. And I think there’s an even darker layer beneath it. Sometimes people don’t actually want attention because they love themselves too much, but because attention briefly silences the suspicion that they might be fundamentally forgettable. That’s why applause fades so quickly. It doesn’t heal insecurity; it only interrupts it for a moment. The silence afterward becomes louder than before.
What I admire the most is that you refuse the lazy moral conclusion. You don’t mock the “attention-seeking slut”, you humanize them without romanticizing them. That takes courage because modern culture rewards cruelty disguised as sophistication. You chose precision instead. Compassion with sharp edges. Very few writers can hold both at once.
And your final insight about micro-attention inside close relationships felt profoundly important. I honestly think the collapse of intimacy in modern life has created an inflationary economy of performance. People who are deeply witnessed in private rarely need to audition so aggressively in public. The internet didn’t invent attention hunger; it industrialized loneliness.
Also, the ending is haunting because it implicates the writer too. You never stand above the phenomenon dissecting it safely from a distance. You stand inside it, confessing your own participation while analyzing the architecture of it. That honesty gives the essay weight. And uou always do that in your pieces.
“Respect arrives like sediment. Attention arrives like fireworks” is one of those lines people will carry around in their heads for years.
“Attention briefly silences the suspicion that they might be fundamentally forgettable.” That is the layer you have named with a precision that makes me want to revise the essay, which is the best thing a reader can do to a writer.
Because you are right that it reframes the entire mechanism. It isn’t self-love driving the performance. It’s the terror of self-erasure. Applause as temporary anesthesia for a wound it cannot actually close. And the silence afterward being louder… that is the cruel mathematics of intermittent reward. Each interruption raises the baseline of the anxiety it was meant to quiet. The slot machine fails to satisfy and deepens the need.
“The internet didn’t invent attention hunger; it industrialised loneliness.” I would have been proud to write that sentence. It belongs in my essay.
What you have identified about standing inside rather than above was the only honest position available to me. The essayist who dissects a human failing from a safe altitude is simply performing a more sophisticated version of the same hunger, the need to be seen as the one who sees clearly. Implicating myself wasn’t courage so much as the minimum requirement for intellectual honesty.
Thank you, Céline, for reading all the way to the mechanics, and then going one layer deeper than I did!
"...I glimpse it in silent exchanges, unremarkable dinners, messages sent without expectation of response, work produced with no guarantee of applause, and in those glimpses, something resembles sufficiency, which is perhaps the closest most of us will get to peace."
Sufficiency...yes. If I've understood you correctly, I think I first noticed it in others, then later, a spark of recognition about something *I* did or said or thought. It has a dangerous side, or a need-to-be-careful-side though. One night, I caught myself saying, in essence, "...if it (a love relationship) never becomes (more) or (better) than this, as it is right now, will that be enough...will it be sufficient." My answer was "Yes." I was wrong. Sufficiency has its place, but it is not everything for every thing. I think. Thanks for this, Tamara./t
“Sufficiency” is one of those words that sounds like arrival but can easily become a ceiling. You have touched the difference between sufficiency as rest and sufficiency as resignation. In a love relationship, asking “is this enough?” from a place of fullness is very different from asking it from a place of exhausted negotiation. The first is peace. The second is a treaty signed under duress.
I think sufficiency works the best as a temporary measure of the present, not a verdict on the future. Applied to attention, to the need to be witnessed, it functions well, right now, this moment of being seen is enough, I don’t need to chase more. Applied to love, though, it can trick us into accepting a diminished version of what we actually need, if what we need hasn’t yet fully declared itself.
Saying yes, then discovering you were wrong is what happens when sufficiency gets promoted beyond its rank.
Thank you, T, for bringing something so precise and so personal into this conversation! I am grateful.
Tamara: “You have touched the difference between sufficiency as rest and sufficiency as resignation.”
Yes, a thousand rosaries Yes! Eventually, in a kind of visceral but unarticulated evolution, I mostly figured this out. How strange that I, who lives in words, could not find the word or concept or realize that I was actively in and of “resignation,” of “a peace treaty signed under duress,” as you so brilliantly and poetically put it. Now that I hear the word, fully grasp its laser-focused meaning in that answer I gave to my question that night, I understand.
What has resignation always meant to me? What has it so fully meant as to ban it
from my conscious grasping to the point of not being able to think it or even say it?
I don’t know for sure what it was back then, and maybe sometimes now, but I have clues.
Maybe it was the influence of the Dominican nuns and Jesuit priests of my education, my WW2 hero (to me) glider pilot father who survived flying his plane into a massive line of French hedgerows During D-Day rather than give up the men and equipment within, my wild yet reserved and detached Irish mother whom I adored and feared in equal measure and with whom I always sought to anticipate the road of conciliatory détente (or, on my own bad day, arouse her fiercest angers with a detachment of my own!); maybe it was being married, briefly, to a good-looking man, a Naval officer who flew in Viet Nam and came home…strange, and who, after I divorced him, joined the Est therapy cult and wrote me a letter of amends for something I never knew: having wanted to push me down the stairs in our New York apartment building—lol, I NEVER resigned myself to thinking that was anything other than his own self-loathing with adjacent homicidal tendencies—I know we could perhaps call it PTSD, but, no; maybe it was deciding, realizing, I’m gay and going through the resignation trope of “well, at least they aren’t killing us here in West Hollywood” (but they were killing the gay guys with indifference or outright hostility: AIDS, and some of my close male friends).
Or maybe, it was just the performative, pre-algorithmic intuition to stay below the radar of my own desires and needs. What better way to do that than not have a word for it. Resignation, the word and the concept, was something to be avoided, not even acknowledged, because it implied weakness, maybe even a lack of bravery and courage.
I guess this is a whole other discussion, the idea of performative resignation, resigning oneself to that which is, to the most casual observer, a bad deal! Thanks, Tamara…I always learn, recognize and want to participate in your essays of life./t
I wonder if the attention/respect continuum you touch on actually slips in lived experience from sliding genres, classes, taxonomies into something darker, something closer to parallelism or opposing magnetism poles even. I tend to think so. When attention assaults you abundantly, naturally, almost exhaustively you begin to notice there often comes with it the social penalty of varying degrees of disrespect. It's a societal “coat-of-many-colors” syndrome. When attention is your blessing, respect, if it arrives at all, comes only after some micro- or whole life- exile, incarceration, and slavery.
If you are born with beauty or athleticism or a natural charisma, then very often respect has to be earned, and even then it will come with specious tolls and a long list of retractions in the fine print. A beautiful woman will evoke and dismiss comments on her appearance almost out-of-hand because they can be so tiresome, but the need for respect may become a desperation to her when looks limit her fullness. An athlete will hardly ever be taken seriously in a ‘respectable’ field because all assume his legacy on the field can translate into unwarranted position only. That either of these two people might be a person of intelligence or character triggers red flags of unfairness within the group and is held highly suspicious.
To me, it seems difficult for the Josephs of the world to achieve mutual levels of both attention and respect simultaneously. It took the nightmares of a Pharaoh for Joseph himself to overcome the squalor that the envy of his favored status had brought down upon his life. And how many I ask are fortunate enough to have a frightened Pharaoh handy to remove their stigma of attention hoarding. Probably one could count the number on one hand. Societies really do seem to have within them mechanisms for the preservation and balance of rewards: too much attention, dock the respect metric, while those deserving of respect often live in the shallows and shadows of the attention pools.
The Joseph analogy belongs here because it captures that societies don’t simply distribute attention and respect unevenly, they actively deploy one as a tax on the other. Abundance of the first triggers a collective instinct to withhold the second, as if the total available dignity in any room were fixed, and someone radiant were already drawing more than their share.
What you describe is recognition as a zero-sum suspicion. The beautiful woman who must spend decades proving she also thinks. The athlete condemned to perpetual seriousness-debt no matter how many rooms he enters with something really worth saying. The penalty is structural, almost immune-systemic. The group produces antibodies against anyone who accumulates too much of the visible kind of worth, because visible worth feels, to the group, like a threat to the distribution.
Your point about simultaneity is where it gets philosophically uncomfortable. Attention and respect may not simply exist on a continuum, they may, as you suggest, actively repel each other past a certain threshold. As if full presence in both registers at once triggers a collective anxiety about fairness that no individual achievement can override.
The Pharaoh’s nightmare as the only socially acceptable mechanism for converting one currency into the other is a painful observation about how rarely real re-evaluation happens without crisis forcing it.
Thank you, Andrew, for bringing something this layered into my conversation!
English peerage and heraldry, like the French court you referenced, are the oldest performance rewarding algorithms we have. Sir Paul McCartney was not knighted for his noble service to the crown, his chivalry, his valued respect. He received the blade because he had become a state sanctioned souvenir. The front row swooners at an Elvis concert did not faint out of respect for his magnetic hip gyrations. Here's where the Swedes and the Norwegians separate themselves; they award their Noble prizes for noble, respected works, most of which garner the attention of exceptionally small niche audiences. I think of your father’s medals of honor, sitting on a private shelf in a private home commanding respect and not a drop of attention.
The Nobel versus the knighthood ratifies impact measured over time, often work that spent decades ignored by everyone except the people it mattered the most to. The other ratifies visibility already achieved, the blade descending on a shoulder already famous, confirming what the market had long since decided.
Which means the Swedish Academy does something almost countercultural, insisting that depth precedes recognition, that the attention should follow the work rather than constitute it. A lonely and increasingly drastic position.
The front row swoon is the perfect counter-image… pure attention, zero respect, and absolutely electric, which suggests the two don’t exist on a continuum. Sometimes they operate in entirely separate registers, measuring entirely different things, occasionally about the same person simultaneously.
Thank you for sharpening the argument from a direction I hadn’t anticipated!
Ms.T, please don't think I take anything I say as serious argument. I try to engage your work openly, with curiosity and the respect it earns. Even if I say something with some conviction or follow up a reply by doubling down on an angle I'm exploring, mone of it has been rigorously considered. It's all just top of the head 'what ifs.' I throw out irreverent angles now and then just to add some spice or humor or a little caustic click bait. But always the underlying thread is meant to represent the salon as well as I'm able. Think of it less as the Hall of Commons (much less the hall of lords) and more as a great hall of vikings where respect is a matter of honor; where an insult that lands wrong may well escalate into a duel of hammers and swords. I don't take my words too seriously, but your salon and your facilitation of the proceedings very seriously.
I mentioned your father in that brief reply only with the greatest respect in mind. He strikes me as a man as far removed from attention shutting as is possible to be. If my words suggested anything short of that, I apologize to both you and him, and to the salon. Walking the edges I do is precarious, sometimes a matter of one step beyond a common sense line. But a false penetration is never intended to insult, and I will walk it back immediately once it's pointed out.
My dearest Andrew, the Viking hall is the right image for what this space tries to be… no, not the performative decorum of the Lords, where disagreement wears a cravat, but something older and more honest, where the argument itself is the form of respect. I love that!
No apology needed. You read my father correctly :)
Walk the edges! Please! That’s where the interesting footing is for me!
Oh, and just so we're clear on this one final point; a man can have piano hands even if he is not technically a piano man. I don't happen to play, but I'm proficient in multiple genres: classical, jazzy touch, even some grinding grunge when the keyboard I'm on requires it. It just takes a love of the instrument and a good ear.
“I remember meeting a woman once who described herself as “chronically charming”. She could enter any room and generate warmth within minutes. People loved her. Yet during a late conversation she admitted she had no idea how to be loved beyond charm. “If I stop performing”, she said, “I disappear.” That sentence still sits in my mind because the attention-seeking slut is, at core, terrified of social evaporation. Being physically present yet perceptually absent. The meeting where no one references your contribution. The group chat where your message receives silence while others spark conversation. Micro-erasures accumulate…”
Just wanting to cut to the chase without any detours, an article on ADHD recently posited the genuine need for a "body double" to anchor our otherwise hyperactive and unfocused brains.
So maybe all our seeking and wanting attention, is the need for the presence of another in our lives, without whom we are free-floating anxieties, and with whom we are acrobatic sport kites dancing with full control in the wind?
The body double concept reframes everything rather usefully, what looks like attention-seeking may simply be nervous system regulation dressed in social clothing. Not vanity. Not ego. Just a brain that cannot find its own ground without another body in the room.
The kite image is very good . Without the tension of the string, someone holding the other end, present, attentive, there is no flight. Only drift.
I read the whole thing. Then all the comments and all of your responses. A veritable dance of attentions. Quite remarkable. I then liked the post and went to take a shower. I am duty manager in the old hunting lodge, being in service to a female choir of 36. The house is full of song and in between their sessions we feed them, clean up after them, reset for the next meal and make sure the vibe stays clean and supportive. It is heart filled work and exhausting in equal measure. So I had no capacity to respond and asked myself, what does it matter?
As I showered the day away a response to my own question began to trickle into emergence. What is attention to me? As a musician I have been on stage and watched as an audience of 1000 dances themselves into a frenzy. It is an amazing feeling to be appreciated like that but in those moments I always felt like the band was paying attention to the audience. Reading the room. Working with what they gave us. We were in service. I have been in service today. It is attention with heart. With a focus.
I once posted a not here on substack saying that I thought some of my best writing was in other people's comment sections. It is still true. Why? Because the art of paying attention is a beautiful thing no? Not for a response. For the simply wonderful awe that saying 'I see you' can offer. Of course here I am now writing about how wonderful I am to be telling all these people how wonderful they are. It is of course pure performance. And conscious too. It is still true that I get more interaction in comment sections than when I write my own stuff. So be it. There is a difference. When I write in response, I have another person as an external focus. I can work with that. I am a poet. When I write for my tiny but lovely audience, they are more amorphous. Fascinating right? Last night as I was catching up on some reading after another long shift, I got a message from a reader in my dm.
It said this, " I am off to dreamland.. but I just wanted to close this day by telling you how deeply your words touched me today. There is a beautiful eloquence in the things you say... They really moved me, and I am overcome with gratitude. Thank you, my friend."
So here are my closing thoughts on the matter of attention. When I wrote to this reader about a piece of their work, I meant every word I said and I said it all with a conscious love in my heart and an intention for them and their work to feel witnessed. I paid them attention on purpose........and, I also caught the voice in my head that said 'They will love this. You'll probably get a nice reply."
There it is in a nutshell. I would love to be able to be in service and not need to get anything in return but I rode that train to burnout once before.
The band paying attention to the audience is an inversion most performers never articulate and almost none admit, right? The stage as a site of mutual witness, which means the thousand people dancing weren’t receiving your attention so much as completing a circuit that neither side could close alone.
The external focus (a specific person, a particular piece of work) gives the attention somewhere to land with precision. The amorphous audience, by contrast, requires you to invent the receiver, which is a different and lonelier act of imagination. You are not more generous in comment sections. You are more grounded. There’s a body to attend to.
And then the voice…. They will love this. You’ll probably get a nice reply. The fact that you caught it doesn’t disqualify the love that was also genuinely there. Both were true simultaneously, which is the condition the essay is really about, not the purity of motive but the permanent mixture of it, and what we do with the knowledge of the mixture.
The burnout line is where the ethics actually live. Sustainable service requires intake. The outflow arrow your fellow commenter described needs its counterpart, as maintenance. Needing a slice of the pie is the condition that makes the giving renewable.
You described the whole essay in a shower. That seems about right, Paul! Thank you so much!
I can only speak to the band inversion from my experience. Perhaps it was to do with the presence of the two Moroccan musicians, one of whom had been a teacher of mine. Our common outlook was rooted in community and was a primary reason for the band coming into being. I never visited North or West Africa as a tourist but as a student of the music and by default the culture and I was always welcomed into indigenous homes and families and hosted with a depth that still moves me to this day. It left lasting mark on me. When you eat off a common plate with people who have so much less in material terms, but so much more in heart, you are changed by it. You do not change. It changes you.
Of course as a band we wanted to 'make it' too and flirted with that until the day it all imploded...another story for another day perhaps. I would like to believe that most performers understand the symbiotic dance with audience, that circuit to which you allude. Mutaal witnessing is a lovely phrasing.
Your grounding observation is sharp and I am here thinking 'of course.' A lifetime of service has led me to the knowing that I must be 'able' to serve and so renewable Paul is a must. Off to recharge my batteries after another hospitality shift. Time for some cabin vibes.
Yes, the moment the circuit with the audience becomes secondary to the career machinery around it, something in the original current breaks. Not always but often enough to be a pattern worth naming.
“Renewable Paul” is the whole ethical framework in two words.
Whenever this topic comes up, I remember Truman Capote’s biography. He had a deeply complicated relationship with his mother and father, and grew into someone highly sociable and hungry for attention. His longtime partner, Jack Dunphy, had a loving mother and was far more private himself. He cared about being recognised as a writer, of course, but he didn’t chase it. I see this pattern in many of my friends and acquaintances as well. People who grew up with one or two unreliable parents often carry these patterns with them. It’s hard not to notice once you see it.
Another thing I’ve noticed among them is how heavily they rely on karma and reciprocity. They constantly give compliments, and many come back to them in return. At one point, that was almost painful to watch because these are genuinely talented, good people, yet the eagerness with which they praise others can sometimes make the compliments feel hollow. That opens another question: what is the attention of an attention seeker worth? And if the attention seeker is the default human nowadays, what does that mean for the entire attention economy?
The Capote and Dunphy pairing is almost too perfect as a case study. Of course, it proves a rule but more than that, it illustrates the variable so cleanly. Same world, same circles, same literary ambitions, radically different relationships to being seen. The difference located, as you suggest, not in talent or intelligence but in the early experience of being reliably held.
Your question about the value of an attention-seeker’s attention unsettles me. If compliments are currency spent to generate return, they become a transaction dressed as generosity, and the recipient, however unconsciously, often senses the structure beneath the warmth. The praise feels slightly off, slightly eager, slightly too well-timed because the giving is essential. It has somewhere to go…. which leads to your larger question with dread: if reciprocal compliment exchange becomes the dominant grammar of attention, we end up in an economy of mutual inflation where the currency loses purchasing power entirely. Everyone is affirmed, nothing is believed, and real recognition becomes almost impossible to distinguish from the transactional one. We lose the ability to receive it cleanly even when it comes.
The default attention-seeker as the baseline human condition may mean we are collectively losing fluency in a register we haven’t yet named the loss of.
Thank you for the Capote example and the question! I needed that, Valentina.
Thank you for answering, Tamara. It really is unsettling, but there’s always room for hope that spontaneity and people who can stand being unpopular will prevail. :')
An acquaintance of decades was always surrounded by people. Not necessarily because they like him, but it eventually emerged that he needed their attention to feed on, in huge quantities. Most Saturday evenings I was one of the many regularly invited. It became evident that invitees were required, so that he could hold court.
He was always the centre of attention. I met him through a friend, but to this day am not convinced he actually liked or respected me, or any of the others.
He scoffed at anyone who held a religious faith. He thought himself too intelligent & well-adjusted to need that.
As the years passed, my respect faded. As he soared the heights of an internationally recognised career, he became emotional distant from us. I increasingly found him obnoxious.
Where once he criticised guests for smoking, he now chain-smoked. He suddenly looked unhealthy, even old. A smile no longer settled on his face.
I concluded that he had no inner, self-contained peace. No soul. Just a shell.
He had become what a lifelong attention seeker becomes.
This is the long portrait my essay gestured toward, the trajectory rather than the snapshot. The Saturday evenings as tribute, the court requiring its audience out of structural necessity. And then the slow decline, the contradictions accumulating, the smoke, the hardened face, the smile that stopped finding anywhere to land.
The detail about religion is telling. Sorry, but it is! Contempt for faith often masks contempt for need itself, the refusal to acknowledge that something outside the self might be required to complete it. A man who scoffs at others kneeling is frequently a man terrified of his own knees.
Then no inner self-contained peace, just a shell…. is the destination I warn toward. When external confirmation becomes the only structure of a self, and the confirmation keeps arriving but stops nourishing, there is nothing left to fall back on. The audience was never going to be enough. It never is. But by the time that becomes clear, the capacity for solitude has often been spent.
Thank you for the long view, Russell! It’s fascinating!
No need to apologise for religion, Tamara. Prayer helped me survive after the loss of my family.
And I sometimes chuckle to myself when an atheist asserts with such ‘certainty’ that there is no living entity beyond our field of view.
In some ways, we can see no more than a fish in a tank in a room with one tiny window overlooking a brick wall. That fish can never know what is beyond.
Negotiation with attention seeking is practically a rite of passage. Like many things, the psychic reward of attention threatens to traipse over the bluff into gluttony.
Of course, having read as many economics books as I have, I’m tempted to think of this phenomenon…well, economically. Particularly in the current era of the attention economy, where the desperation for the psychic reward often fosters the need to churn out “content” that is little more than what the nomenclature suggests. And yet, in spite of how debasing people may find it, there is a widespread audience for it. If the formula didn’t work, it would float dead in the water along with the endless cavalcade of ephemeral novelties churned out for a short-term profit, both figuratively and literally.
The problem is that, for a social species, attention also serves as a function of worth that one can only escape if, and only if, they have learned to survive by transcending social considerations, like an eremite or a pariah. Rarely, if ever, is this a choice. It’s not unlike a coyote chewing off a caught paw because it’s the only way to survive. In spite of what one might say about compensating or having learned to live without, they may simply be anesthetized to an absence to a degree. It’s very likely one who has thrown off the ornamental, yet burdensome, mantle of sociability sometimes sighs and looks back maudlin, as though mourning a dead god, who was at once both giver and oppressor, and the giver is the one who gets missed, and the oppressor is the one who gets forgotten (limerence works according to this fallacy: one may run away due to necessity, but the memory they retain is biased toward the nostalgic, particularly in their worst moments).
As for attention, one can be trained ideologically into antagonizing it as adolescent boys often do (like I did, to an extent). People who are spurned, whether or not it’s due to their own unconscious iniquities, can find some superficial succour in being the guy who needs no one; like a lonely rider. But the only reason there’s a Byronic romance with the lonely rider in the first place is because some observer gave him that name. Otherwise, there’s no validation.
For my part, I can be affable and gregarious. I’m an experienced performer; I can hold a room or a conversation, and as you age, you realize there’s art and decorum to it, and in some environments, you keep your mouth shut; and in some environments, you act as the life of the party. It’s the same way as bankers or day-traders who acknowledge the reward of money, but have learned to transcend its dominance and construe it, instead, as a commodity.
In those terms, attention-seeking can be a form of avarice. “Slut” works as an analog; so does “glutton”. In both cases, validation comes from a need for uncontrolled consumption. Spoken that way, it’s not the attention that’s the problem; it’s the sluthood!
Actually, the only quarrel I would have with the premise of this treatise is just that: how slut is defined in this case. Particularly if everyone is prone to attention-seeking. But in the same way everyone is prone to sex-seeking (with exceptions, just like attention), it’s the reason for the need to validate that’s at issue. I would imagine that, not unlike sex, you can survive without attention; but it probably isn’t healthy.
I can say that I feel very little motivation to communicate to an unreceptive world, so there could be two things at work here: either I’ve simply a diminished concept for the “intrinsic virtue” of writing or output; or it’s because a neurotic impulse compels me to put too much stake in the feedback of attention. I’m hoping it’s the latter.
“The only reason there’s a Byronic romance with the lonely rider is because some observer gave him that name.” That sentence does more philosophical work than most paragraphs I’ve read this month. Brilliant!!! The pose of needing no one is itself a performance requiring an audience to complete it, which means radical self-sufficiency is, structurally, one of the most attention-dependent positions available. The hermit needs witnesses to his hermitage.
The limerence parallel is precise in a way that unsettles me productively. Memory edited toward the giver, away from the oppressor, which means the nostalgia for social belonging, even when belonging was costly, always works from corrupted data. We don’t miss what it actually was. We miss the curated highlight reel our own psychology produced in its absence.
Your banker analogy reframes the entire question usefully. The problem was never the commodity — money, attention, sex — but the inability to absorb it without being consumed by the metabolising. Avarice as the failure of proportion rather than the presence of appetite. Which means the essay’s “slut” and your “glutton” are cousins pointing at the same underlying dysfunction: not wanting, but wanting without any internal governor on the wanting.
Your closing hope strikes me as exactly the right thing to hope for. The first is treatable by experience. The second is a much lonelier diagnosis.
Thank you, Ian, for bringing an argument that is layered and self-aware! But then… you always do!
There is more than one response to this essay for me. There is the response to the essay itself. And there is the response to the use of the word "slut."
I'll start with the word, because my reaction to the word was so strong, so intense, I almost didn't read the essay at all. And when I did, because I knew whatever word you used, it would be worth reading, I felt a deep heaviness as I read. Not just the first time, every time. I looked up the word, just to be sure of myself, and I was correct in thinking that the word was never used in any but a derogatory way. Never. It originally referred to a woman who was messy, dirty (with literal dirt), and/or dressed in a slovenly way. Depending on who wrote the definition, the sexual connotation of the word was recent-ish.
At one point you wrote "reclaiming the term 'attention-seeking slut' carries some subversive value. Not celebratory. But clarifying." I respectfully disagree. Whether you intend it or not, the word slut carries with it a derogatory intention. I was curious why my reaction was so intense around the word, and eventually I realised that if it was derogatory, and if you were right that we all participate in a certain amount of attention-seeking, then it meant you were being derogatory toward me, and that thought hurt very deeply. Of course I know that was and is not your intention at all. However, if I accept the word, than intended or not, I accept being named a word that in every connotation and variation (other than your new use of it) is derogatory toward me. And I do not accept that.
However, the ideas in the essay itself are not dependent on the word, so the rest of the essay can be discussed in terms of attention and attention-seeking vs. recognition. At first, when I read this I wanted to say that I spent much of my life trying to hide in plain sight, not to seek attention. And while that's true to a great extent, it doesn't mean I did nothing to seek attention. I think I did. And I don't know if this is the same or not, but when I look back, I think my attention-seeking was what you might call target-specific. There were certain people I respected or admired and I sought their attention. Often teachers, other adults, occasional fellow students. My focus was on their attention, not anyone's attention, and my behavior was targeted accordingly. I wasn't socially great going into my teens, and I had to work at being able to talk to people, especially adults. The positive attention that got as I improved, helped me to learn more and get better at it.
I appreciate "attention-seeking demands arrival...recognition arrives as consequence." Also of attention tending to be loud, where respect/recognition tends to be quiet, and the need for both of them, to some extent. The only thing I'm not sure I agree with is that only the attention brings the spark of joy of being delighted. I feel as if I've experienced that in the quieter moments of recognition as well, and that it meant even more to me in that context. But that may just be me.
What really interested me was at the beginning, the attention-seeking seemed to be attention for its own sake. Toward the end, attention-seeking becomes "the desire to matter beyond immediate circles persists. To contribute, resonate, ripple outward in some direction." To make a difference, to help others. And you lead into what you call "calibration rather than elimination. Learning to seek attention without selling oneself for it." It's what you described earlier in yourself - staying where it's not always comfortable, and continuing on.
When you write these essays, of course you want people to read them. But it's more than that, you want them to matter, to make people think. And you do! Reading the comments and the dialogue between you and your readers that is evident. In a way, you are the best argument for your own essay, the embodiment that "Somewhere between invisibility and exhibition, between respect sentiment and spotlight flicker, there exists a livable middle ground where attention becomes conversation rather than conquest." Maybe, as you say, you don't inhabit it consistently. You do, however, show us how it's done. Thank you for that!
I expected objection to the word. You are right about the etymology and that reclamation is never a unilateral act, the writer cannot simply declare a word redeemed and expect every reader to experience it that way. Language carries its history in the body before it reaches the mind, which is why your near-abandonment of my essay before reading it is not a failure of generosity on your part. It is language doing what language does, arriving with baggage no authorial intention can fully unpack at the door.
What I can say is that the discomfort was intentional, but your point forces me to ask whether intentional discomfort and unintentional harm can always be cleanly separated. I’m not certain they can. The subversive value I claimed for the reclamation may work differently depending on what the word has already cost the reader personally.
I like your distinction between target-specific attention-seeking and generalised performance . Seeking the regard of someone you really admire, a teacher, a mind worth impressing, is categorically different from broadcasting into an undifferentiated crowd hoping something has an impact. The first is aspiration with a face. The second is anxiety without an address.
Your observation that silent recognition can carry its own spark, that it can move us as deeply as applause, perhaps more durably, is a genuine correction to something I overstated.
Thank you, Doc, for staying with my essay despite the weight, and for disagreeing with such precision and care!
I appreciate so much your response to my comment, Tamara. To be clear, I don't feel any harm, unintentional or not, was done by your use of the word. My feelings were intense, and the heaviness was real, and it led me to learn something about myself. That I felt it was important not to accept what I perceived as a disparaging word, one for me to use about myself in how I go about my life, was a good thing for me to see and know about myself. Also, that I was willing to say that to you, who I deeply respect and care about, tells me how much I trust you to respond with the generosity and precision that you did. I learn so much from our conversations, about both of us. And I cherish that - and you.
I often wonder if our disdain for attention seekers, at its core, is that they threaten to take attention away from us. Instead of some moral objection, maybe it's just one big slut tug-of-war, where the real resentment likes in the inflation of attention-demand, in the same way that sexual promiscuity is resented because it threatens to lower the market value of sex.
Your piece confirms these suspicions. We know that loud people are loud because volume works at drowning out signal, and since depth is more expensive and a bigger risk in general, the crowd naturally gets progressively louder because it's the more adaptive strategy. And the louder things get, the more crucial it is that we recognize the reward loops, so they necessarily become more intrusive, and our search for them becomes more ritualist, and at worst, desperate.
"Fine attracts attention; truth disrupts it" is utterly brilliant, and it hinges your entire conception of the "slut" and its attendant derision.
The most alarming insight, for me, is that private attention - being seen by someone in close proximity - reduces the urgency of attention-seeking in public. The reason for the alarm is that you can then trace a reverse correlation between private attention and public-seeking sluttery. In other words, the technology is incentivizing attention-seeking sluts, as it simultaneously isolates people from each other, creating a type of unholy synergy that seems increasingly impossible for us to extricate ourselves from.
Fantastic, as always. I'm hoping that this comment "lands", because I'm a slut for the Muse's attention.
Hmmm… If attention is a market, then disdain for attention-seekers is less moral disapproval than competitive protectionism. We are not offended by their hunger; we are threatened by their supply-side aggression. The moralisation is a price-fixing mechanism in disguise. I liked your analogy.
And I think that your reverse correlation is the most structurally precise observation my essay has generated și far. Private witness as inoculation against public desperation, which means the technology isn’t exploiting a pre-existing weakness but manufacturing the conditions of its own necessity. Dissolve the close-proximity bonds, flood the resulting vacuum with intermittent public reward loops, then monetise the compulsion. The slot machine exploits the gambler and it first ensures the gambler has nowhere else to go.
And your closing line lands perfectly… maybe because it’s self-aware, or because it’s true, and because recognising the mechanism while still pulling the lever is the most honest position any of us can occupy.
It landed, dear Andrew! It always lands. (* and by the way, I really dislike this verb!)
My perspective of disdain for attention seekers is not that they take attention from me, but that they essentially waste everyone’s time and distract focus from those more measured and knowledgeable individuals that have something more important to say. Maybe that is a moral objection, but practical. They could work on their quality over quantity.
Who decides which voices are more measured, more knowledgeable, more worth the room’s focus? That arbitration has historically been wrong in interesting ways, dismissing the loud outsider who turned out to be right, elevating the composed insider who turned out to be empty. Confidence of manner and quality of thought have always been unreliable proxies for each other.
I think you are entirely correct in the quantity versus quality diagnosis. The attention economy’s particular damage isn’t that it amplifies hunger, since hunger is human, but that it rewards volume over depth so systematically that eventually the incentive to slow down and get it right becomes economically irrational. The measured voice learns to perform urgency or disappears.
Which makes your disdain less a moral objection than an aesthetic one, in the oldest sense, a preference for what has been earned over what has merely been insisted upon.
Thank you for the pushback, Cody! It sharpens my argument
Rather than a “who decides”, I’m thinking of the volume of whatever type of content that it takes those readers or audience to digest. It probably comes back to time more than anything, but I agree that any other way of deciding what is good or right would be problematic. Even for example whatever algorithm formula is used to “decide”, because I noticed that has missed some gems too. We can’t physically view everything, and have a real life, but a network of friends helps sort it out too. I doubt I actually have a disdain because I don’t mind looking for something interesting for awhile, just thinking about it overall. Glad to have helped sharpen your argument somehow!
Its a game of threads and who is genuinely working towards system coherence and alignment, those that speak empty words and those that talk and express weight, gravity.
You are brilliant because you refuse the comforting lie that attention-seeking is only an influencer problem. Some of the most desperate performers now wear the costume of seriousness: Substack philosophers posting 12 existential selfies a week, podcast men confusing “having an audience” with “having a personality”, intellectuals performing vulnerability with the strategic precision of luxury branding campaigns. Nothing more tragic than a grown man curating his own mystique like a scented candle line.
The modern attention economy has produced people who cannot experience a sunset, a thought, or a heartbreak until it has been converted into content and reflected back to them by strangers. Entire personalities now exist as hostage negotiations with the algorithm. “Please witness me” dressed up as thought leadership.
And the truly brilliant thing you achieve here is naming the difference between being seen and being known. Most people are not chasing intimacy at all but proof of existence through audience reaction. Applause has replaced character. Visibility has replaced substance. We are living through an era where even authenticity arrives with captions, and engagement analytics attached.
The saddest species of all is the man who mistakes public intrigue for depth. The man with 47 “provocative” essays or stories about human connection who still cannot make eye contact across an actual dinner table without checking whether his performance is landing. Versailles with Wi-Fi. Narcissus with a newsletter.
Tamara, you’re the nuclear reactor of writing on Substack.
“Narcissus with a newsletter” is going straight into my private anthology of clever sentences.
The hostage negotiation framing is precise in a way that most media criticism isn’t since it correctly identifies the coercive quality of algorithmic dependency. It isn’t vanity exactly, of course! But the particular desperation of someone who has handed their sense of reality over to a system that returns it only intermittently, and on conditions.
The scented candle line destroyed me. It’s funny, and the curated mystique is so recognisable, the carefully disheveled thinking pose, the strategic admission of doubt deployed to signal depth, the vulnerability that arrives pre-lit and colour-graded. Performed interiority is still performance. The costume of seriousness, as you put it, may be the most elaborate disguise the attention economy has produced, because it borrows the visual language of real thought.
“Versailles with Wi-Fi” is the essay I should have written and I didn’t!!!
Thank you for reading with teeth, Clara! You always do and I love your comments!
Great essay, Tamara. I am one of those people where my posts land into silence....yet I know others see them, yet they won't support me or care to, doesn't matter if it is just basic decency of expressing condolences or sharing the joy of graduation. You point this out much more astutely, here put more bluntly, is where I think this performative attention seeking bullshit has gone wrong: we may seek attention, certainly as writers and performers which validates us and gives us needed feedback as well as income. But when the opportunity to be real with someone, to show respect, to truly listen, to be there when it's hard, a curtain suddenly goes up, where hanging out is only possible...with conditions. Then you become an inconvenience, "crazy", "too much". People seem to have amassed a litany of excuses to no longer see you as human. This spans across families too, friends from primary, longstanding people who have known you. It is betrayal obscured by a veil of attention seeking yet no attention giving. Today a friend from university randomly texted me letting me know that she was in town and if I wanted to see a show. She is a neurologist, but when I got sick, I contacted her, terrified about what was happening to my brain. She brushed it off as unimportant, oh it will resolve, she said, disinterested. It hasn't resolved for ...6 years. My response was, "sorry, I can't. I hope you enjoy your visit." My feeling to get this message wasn't one of genuineness but of curiosity: the intent to one-up herself over me, the fear of the silent applause that happens by people behind your back when they learn of your hardships, the perpetual envy and comparisons, the fact that socialization has become a competition rather than connection. No thanks, I thought. I have bigger issues to work on and solve. But I wasnt this person before: before, I would jump at any opportunity for an invite, a chance to be "liked", to socialize, to give my heart fully to other people. Now I am so discerning but I also feel more stronglu that I no longer care. I hope that changes and that I find better people. xx
You describe something that sits beneath my essay’s argument but also beyond it because what you have lived isn’t attention-seeking in any of the forms I examined. It’s the withdrawal of basic human recognition at the moments it costs something to give. That’s a different and more painful phenomenon… not the inflation of attention-demand, but the rationing of it by people who were supposed to be exempt from the transaction entirely.
The neurologist story…. I can’t believe it! 6 years!!! A terrified message about your own brain met with casual dismissal by someone whose entire professional life is built around taking the brain seriously. A choice about whose reality counts….. sadly!
The discernment you have arrived at is the hard-won knowledge of what real presence actually feels like, which makes its counterfeit immediately recognisable. That recognition is expensive, but at least it’s clarity.
I do hope you find your people, Paulina. They exist, the ones for whom showing up isn’t conditional, for whom your hardship doesn’t become an inconvenience or a comparison point. They are rarer than they should be, and you deserve them without having to perform your way into their attention first.
Thank you for trusting my space with something so unguarded! I am grateful.
I am grateful for you too, Tamara. 💝 Monday is my brother's birthday, and so the grief has really hit me, and I'm a bit falling apart, but it will pass.😢 xx
Grief has its own calendar, and it keeps it ruthlessly…. I hope Monday passes gently.
Thank you, Tamara, I appreciate that. 😇
This is phenomenal writing because it does something very few essays manage. It diagnoses a cultural pathology without flattening the people trapped inside it. You refuse the lazy moral superiority that usually infects discussions about attention, and instead treat attention-seeking as a social symptom, an economic condition, and an existential adaptation all at once. That’s rare intellectual honesty. The line “We built slot machines for the self” alone deserves framing, Tamara.
What makes your essay especially sharp is the distinction between attention and respect. Most people confuse visibility with value because modern systems deliberately collapse the two. Algorithms reward immediacy, not depth. Reaction, not coherence. Your argument exposes how quickly identity becomes market-shaped once recognition is tied to survival. That insight is so important because it extends far beyond social media into entire professional classes built on perpetual self-exhibition.
I want to make a parallel here with the contemporary art world. A great artwork used to accumulate authority slowly, through sustained engagement, criticism, historical placement, and time. Now many works are engineered for instant recognisability, “Instagram legibility”, visual velocity. Not because artists suddenly became shallow, but the ecosystem increasingly rewards attention before contemplation. The “attention-seeking slut” has an institutional equivalent, the artwork that performs importance before it has developed substance. Spectacle becomes a substitute for resonance. The terrifying part is that the system often cannot tell the difference.
What elevates your essay beyond cultural criticism, though, is the refusal to exempt the self. The moments where you admit relief at being noticed are essential because they prevent the piece from becoming performative critique disguised as wisdom. You expose the mechanism while implicating yourself inside it. That tension gives the writing credibility. You are indeed amazing.
And perhaps the most unsettling idea hidden underneath the essay is that attention economies gradually erode the ability to distinguish performance from identity. After enough repetition, the curated self stops feeling curated. The role metabolises into personality. That may be the real danger, not that people perform, but that eventually they forget where the performance ends.
Your themes are formidable and you deconstruct them in your marvelous Museguided way. Another masterpiece.
I am grateful for the parallel with the contemporary art world because it’s the most useful extension of this argument. “Instagram legibility” names something the art world has been reluctant to name about itself, maybe because the institutions benefiting from visual velocity are the same ones still claiming curatorial authority. The artwork engineered for instant recognisability is the cultural equivalent of the sentence written to be screenshot rather than read. Both sacrifice duration for impact, and duration is where meaning accumulates.
Your point about the system being unable to tell the difference is where it gets alarming because eventually the critics, the curators, the algorithms, and the audiences have all been trained on the same reward loops. Discernment requires a different type of attention than the ecosystem has been cultivating. We may be producing entire generations of sophisticated responders who have lost the capacity for slow looking.
I also like the observation about performance. That is the darker endpoint, not the performer who knows they are performing, but the one who has rehearsed the role so thoroughly that the original self underneath becomes archaeologically inaccessible. At that point the question “who are you when no one is watching” produces blankness. Not peace. Blankness!
Thank you, Alexander, for reading me with an art eye!
The greatest compliment. Grateful too.
I am not sure I will ever get to the bottom
of my relationship with attention but it is my biggest love / hate. The dissonance between heart and head and how they vacillate is staggering to me.
But in the end I do think we all need to be seen. A least a little.
Beautifully written.
“At least a little” might be the most honest three words. Not constantly, not compulsively, just enough to confirm the circuit is still live.
Thank you, Holly, for your honesty, and for staying with that dissonance!
What makes your writing unforgettable is that you never flinch from the ugly mechanics beneath ordinary behavior. Most people write about attention as vanity, or weakness, or narcissism. You wrote about it as social, existential, almost biological hunger, and that shift changes everything. You frame uncomfortable truths in a way that makes the reader feel exposed and understood at the same time, which is extraordinarily rare.
The line that stayed with me the most was the idea that people are not seducing others, but “seducing acknowledgment”. That feels so true. And I think there’s an even darker layer beneath it. Sometimes people don’t actually want attention because they love themselves too much, but because attention briefly silences the suspicion that they might be fundamentally forgettable. That’s why applause fades so quickly. It doesn’t heal insecurity; it only interrupts it for a moment. The silence afterward becomes louder than before.
What I admire the most is that you refuse the lazy moral conclusion. You don’t mock the “attention-seeking slut”, you humanize them without romanticizing them. That takes courage because modern culture rewards cruelty disguised as sophistication. You chose precision instead. Compassion with sharp edges. Very few writers can hold both at once.
And your final insight about micro-attention inside close relationships felt profoundly important. I honestly think the collapse of intimacy in modern life has created an inflationary economy of performance. People who are deeply witnessed in private rarely need to audition so aggressively in public. The internet didn’t invent attention hunger; it industrialized loneliness.
Also, the ending is haunting because it implicates the writer too. You never stand above the phenomenon dissecting it safely from a distance. You stand inside it, confessing your own participation while analyzing the architecture of it. That honesty gives the essay weight. And uou always do that in your pieces.
“Respect arrives like sediment. Attention arrives like fireworks” is one of those lines people will carry around in their heads for years.
“Attention briefly silences the suspicion that they might be fundamentally forgettable.” That is the layer you have named with a precision that makes me want to revise the essay, which is the best thing a reader can do to a writer.
Because you are right that it reframes the entire mechanism. It isn’t self-love driving the performance. It’s the terror of self-erasure. Applause as temporary anesthesia for a wound it cannot actually close. And the silence afterward being louder… that is the cruel mathematics of intermittent reward. Each interruption raises the baseline of the anxiety it was meant to quiet. The slot machine fails to satisfy and deepens the need.
“The internet didn’t invent attention hunger; it industrialised loneliness.” I would have been proud to write that sentence. It belongs in my essay.
What you have identified about standing inside rather than above was the only honest position available to me. The essayist who dissects a human failing from a safe altitude is simply performing a more sophisticated version of the same hunger, the need to be seen as the one who sees clearly. Implicating myself wasn’t courage so much as the minimum requirement for intellectual honesty.
Thank you, Céline, for reading all the way to the mechanics, and then going one layer deeper than I did!
"...I glimpse it in silent exchanges, unremarkable dinners, messages sent without expectation of response, work produced with no guarantee of applause, and in those glimpses, something resembles sufficiency, which is perhaps the closest most of us will get to peace."
Sufficiency...yes. If I've understood you correctly, I think I first noticed it in others, then later, a spark of recognition about something *I* did or said or thought. It has a dangerous side, or a need-to-be-careful-side though. One night, I caught myself saying, in essence, "...if it (a love relationship) never becomes (more) or (better) than this, as it is right now, will that be enough...will it be sufficient." My answer was "Yes." I was wrong. Sufficiency has its place, but it is not everything for every thing. I think. Thanks for this, Tamara./t
“Sufficiency” is one of those words that sounds like arrival but can easily become a ceiling. You have touched the difference between sufficiency as rest and sufficiency as resignation. In a love relationship, asking “is this enough?” from a place of fullness is very different from asking it from a place of exhausted negotiation. The first is peace. The second is a treaty signed under duress.
I think sufficiency works the best as a temporary measure of the present, not a verdict on the future. Applied to attention, to the need to be witnessed, it functions well, right now, this moment of being seen is enough, I don’t need to chase more. Applied to love, though, it can trick us into accepting a diminished version of what we actually need, if what we need hasn’t yet fully declared itself.
Saying yes, then discovering you were wrong is what happens when sufficiency gets promoted beyond its rank.
Thank you, T, for bringing something so precise and so personal into this conversation! I am grateful.
Oh!
Tamara: “You have touched the difference between sufficiency as rest and sufficiency as resignation.”
Yes, a thousand rosaries Yes! Eventually, in a kind of visceral but unarticulated evolution, I mostly figured this out. How strange that I, who lives in words, could not find the word or concept or realize that I was actively in and of “resignation,” of “a peace treaty signed under duress,” as you so brilliantly and poetically put it. Now that I hear the word, fully grasp its laser-focused meaning in that answer I gave to my question that night, I understand.
What has resignation always meant to me? What has it so fully meant as to ban it
from my conscious grasping to the point of not being able to think it or even say it?
I don’t know for sure what it was back then, and maybe sometimes now, but I have clues.
Maybe it was the influence of the Dominican nuns and Jesuit priests of my education, my WW2 hero (to me) glider pilot father who survived flying his plane into a massive line of French hedgerows During D-Day rather than give up the men and equipment within, my wild yet reserved and detached Irish mother whom I adored and feared in equal measure and with whom I always sought to anticipate the road of conciliatory détente (or, on my own bad day, arouse her fiercest angers with a detachment of my own!); maybe it was being married, briefly, to a good-looking man, a Naval officer who flew in Viet Nam and came home…strange, and who, after I divorced him, joined the Est therapy cult and wrote me a letter of amends for something I never knew: having wanted to push me down the stairs in our New York apartment building—lol, I NEVER resigned myself to thinking that was anything other than his own self-loathing with adjacent homicidal tendencies—I know we could perhaps call it PTSD, but, no; maybe it was deciding, realizing, I’m gay and going through the resignation trope of “well, at least they aren’t killing us here in West Hollywood” (but they were killing the gay guys with indifference or outright hostility: AIDS, and some of my close male friends).
Or maybe, it was just the performative, pre-algorithmic intuition to stay below the radar of my own desires and needs. What better way to do that than not have a word for it. Resignation, the word and the concept, was something to be avoided, not even acknowledged, because it implied weakness, maybe even a lack of bravery and courage.
I guess this is a whole other discussion, the idea of performative resignation, resigning oneself to that which is, to the most casual observer, a bad deal! Thanks, Tamara…I always learn, recognize and want to participate in your essays of life./t
I wonder if the attention/respect continuum you touch on actually slips in lived experience from sliding genres, classes, taxonomies into something darker, something closer to parallelism or opposing magnetism poles even. I tend to think so. When attention assaults you abundantly, naturally, almost exhaustively you begin to notice there often comes with it the social penalty of varying degrees of disrespect. It's a societal “coat-of-many-colors” syndrome. When attention is your blessing, respect, if it arrives at all, comes only after some micro- or whole life- exile, incarceration, and slavery.
If you are born with beauty or athleticism or a natural charisma, then very often respect has to be earned, and even then it will come with specious tolls and a long list of retractions in the fine print. A beautiful woman will evoke and dismiss comments on her appearance almost out-of-hand because they can be so tiresome, but the need for respect may become a desperation to her when looks limit her fullness. An athlete will hardly ever be taken seriously in a ‘respectable’ field because all assume his legacy on the field can translate into unwarranted position only. That either of these two people might be a person of intelligence or character triggers red flags of unfairness within the group and is held highly suspicious.
To me, it seems difficult for the Josephs of the world to achieve mutual levels of both attention and respect simultaneously. It took the nightmares of a Pharaoh for Joseph himself to overcome the squalor that the envy of his favored status had brought down upon his life. And how many I ask are fortunate enough to have a frightened Pharaoh handy to remove their stigma of attention hoarding. Probably one could count the number on one hand. Societies really do seem to have within them mechanisms for the preservation and balance of rewards: too much attention, dock the respect metric, while those deserving of respect often live in the shallows and shadows of the attention pools.
The Joseph analogy belongs here because it captures that societies don’t simply distribute attention and respect unevenly, they actively deploy one as a tax on the other. Abundance of the first triggers a collective instinct to withhold the second, as if the total available dignity in any room were fixed, and someone radiant were already drawing more than their share.
What you describe is recognition as a zero-sum suspicion. The beautiful woman who must spend decades proving she also thinks. The athlete condemned to perpetual seriousness-debt no matter how many rooms he enters with something really worth saying. The penalty is structural, almost immune-systemic. The group produces antibodies against anyone who accumulates too much of the visible kind of worth, because visible worth feels, to the group, like a threat to the distribution.
Your point about simultaneity is where it gets philosophically uncomfortable. Attention and respect may not simply exist on a continuum, they may, as you suggest, actively repel each other past a certain threshold. As if full presence in both registers at once triggers a collective anxiety about fairness that no individual achievement can override.
The Pharaoh’s nightmare as the only socially acceptable mechanism for converting one currency into the other is a painful observation about how rarely real re-evaluation happens without crisis forcing it.
Thank you, Andrew, for bringing something this layered into my conversation!
English peerage and heraldry, like the French court you referenced, are the oldest performance rewarding algorithms we have. Sir Paul McCartney was not knighted for his noble service to the crown, his chivalry, his valued respect. He received the blade because he had become a state sanctioned souvenir. The front row swooners at an Elvis concert did not faint out of respect for his magnetic hip gyrations. Here's where the Swedes and the Norwegians separate themselves; they award their Noble prizes for noble, respected works, most of which garner the attention of exceptionally small niche audiences. I think of your father’s medals of honor, sitting on a private shelf in a private home commanding respect and not a drop of attention.
The Nobel versus the knighthood ratifies impact measured over time, often work that spent decades ignored by everyone except the people it mattered the most to. The other ratifies visibility already achieved, the blade descending on a shoulder already famous, confirming what the market had long since decided.
Which means the Swedish Academy does something almost countercultural, insisting that depth precedes recognition, that the attention should follow the work rather than constitute it. A lonely and increasingly drastic position.
The front row swoon is the perfect counter-image… pure attention, zero respect, and absolutely electric, which suggests the two don’t exist on a continuum. Sometimes they operate in entirely separate registers, measuring entirely different things, occasionally about the same person simultaneously.
Thank you for sharpening the argument from a direction I hadn’t anticipated!
Ms.T, please don't think I take anything I say as serious argument. I try to engage your work openly, with curiosity and the respect it earns. Even if I say something with some conviction or follow up a reply by doubling down on an angle I'm exploring, mone of it has been rigorously considered. It's all just top of the head 'what ifs.' I throw out irreverent angles now and then just to add some spice or humor or a little caustic click bait. But always the underlying thread is meant to represent the salon as well as I'm able. Think of it less as the Hall of Commons (much less the hall of lords) and more as a great hall of vikings where respect is a matter of honor; where an insult that lands wrong may well escalate into a duel of hammers and swords. I don't take my words too seriously, but your salon and your facilitation of the proceedings very seriously.
I mentioned your father in that brief reply only with the greatest respect in mind. He strikes me as a man as far removed from attention shutting as is possible to be. If my words suggested anything short of that, I apologize to both you and him, and to the salon. Walking the edges I do is precarious, sometimes a matter of one step beyond a common sense line. But a false penetration is never intended to insult, and I will walk it back immediately once it's pointed out.
My dearest Andrew, the Viking hall is the right image for what this space tries to be… no, not the performative decorum of the Lords, where disagreement wears a cravat, but something older and more honest, where the argument itself is the form of respect. I love that!
No apology needed. You read my father correctly :)
Walk the edges! Please! That’s where the interesting footing is for me!
Oh, and just so we're clear on this one final point; a man can have piano hands even if he is not technically a piano man. I don't happen to play, but I'm proficient in multiple genres: classical, jazzy touch, even some grinding grunge when the keyboard I'm on requires it. It just takes a love of the instrument and a good ear.
Exquisitely written!
“I remember meeting a woman once who described herself as “chronically charming”. She could enter any room and generate warmth within minutes. People loved her. Yet during a late conversation she admitted she had no idea how to be loved beyond charm. “If I stop performing”, she said, “I disappear.” That sentence still sits in my mind because the attention-seeking slut is, at core, terrified of social evaporation. Being physically present yet perceptually absent. The meeting where no one references your contribution. The group chat where your message receives silence while others spark conversation. Micro-erasures accumulate…”
Thank you so much for reading me, Tony!
this is brilliant.
thank you, Tamara
Thank you so much for reading me!
Just wanting to cut to the chase without any detours, an article on ADHD recently posited the genuine need for a "body double" to anchor our otherwise hyperactive and unfocused brains.
So maybe all our seeking and wanting attention, is the need for the presence of another in our lives, without whom we are free-floating anxieties, and with whom we are acrobatic sport kites dancing with full control in the wind?
The body double concept reframes everything rather usefully, what looks like attention-seeking may simply be nervous system regulation dressed in social clothing. Not vanity. Not ego. Just a brain that cannot find its own ground without another body in the room.
The kite image is very good . Without the tension of the string, someone holding the other end, present, attentive, there is no flight. Only drift.
Thank you for this, Michael!
I read the whole thing. Then all the comments and all of your responses. A veritable dance of attentions. Quite remarkable. I then liked the post and went to take a shower. I am duty manager in the old hunting lodge, being in service to a female choir of 36. The house is full of song and in between their sessions we feed them, clean up after them, reset for the next meal and make sure the vibe stays clean and supportive. It is heart filled work and exhausting in equal measure. So I had no capacity to respond and asked myself, what does it matter?
As I showered the day away a response to my own question began to trickle into emergence. What is attention to me? As a musician I have been on stage and watched as an audience of 1000 dances themselves into a frenzy. It is an amazing feeling to be appreciated like that but in those moments I always felt like the band was paying attention to the audience. Reading the room. Working with what they gave us. We were in service. I have been in service today. It is attention with heart. With a focus.
I once posted a not here on substack saying that I thought some of my best writing was in other people's comment sections. It is still true. Why? Because the art of paying attention is a beautiful thing no? Not for a response. For the simply wonderful awe that saying 'I see you' can offer. Of course here I am now writing about how wonderful I am to be telling all these people how wonderful they are. It is of course pure performance. And conscious too. It is still true that I get more interaction in comment sections than when I write my own stuff. So be it. There is a difference. When I write in response, I have another person as an external focus. I can work with that. I am a poet. When I write for my tiny but lovely audience, they are more amorphous. Fascinating right? Last night as I was catching up on some reading after another long shift, I got a message from a reader in my dm.
It said this, " I am off to dreamland.. but I just wanted to close this day by telling you how deeply your words touched me today. There is a beautiful eloquence in the things you say... They really moved me, and I am overcome with gratitude. Thank you, my friend."
So here are my closing thoughts on the matter of attention. When I wrote to this reader about a piece of their work, I meant every word I said and I said it all with a conscious love in my heart and an intention for them and their work to feel witnessed. I paid them attention on purpose........and, I also caught the voice in my head that said 'They will love this. You'll probably get a nice reply."
There it is in a nutshell. I would love to be able to be in service and not need to get anything in return but I rode that train to burnout once before.
I want and I need a slice of the pie too.
The band paying attention to the audience is an inversion most performers never articulate and almost none admit, right? The stage as a site of mutual witness, which means the thousand people dancing weren’t receiving your attention so much as completing a circuit that neither side could close alone.
The external focus (a specific person, a particular piece of work) gives the attention somewhere to land with precision. The amorphous audience, by contrast, requires you to invent the receiver, which is a different and lonelier act of imagination. You are not more generous in comment sections. You are more grounded. There’s a body to attend to.
And then the voice…. They will love this. You’ll probably get a nice reply. The fact that you caught it doesn’t disqualify the love that was also genuinely there. Both were true simultaneously, which is the condition the essay is really about, not the purity of motive but the permanent mixture of it, and what we do with the knowledge of the mixture.
The burnout line is where the ethics actually live. Sustainable service requires intake. The outflow arrow your fellow commenter described needs its counterpart, as maintenance. Needing a slice of the pie is the condition that makes the giving renewable.
You described the whole essay in a shower. That seems about right, Paul! Thank you so much!
I can only speak to the band inversion from my experience. Perhaps it was to do with the presence of the two Moroccan musicians, one of whom had been a teacher of mine. Our common outlook was rooted in community and was a primary reason for the band coming into being. I never visited North or West Africa as a tourist but as a student of the music and by default the culture and I was always welcomed into indigenous homes and families and hosted with a depth that still moves me to this day. It left lasting mark on me. When you eat off a common plate with people who have so much less in material terms, but so much more in heart, you are changed by it. You do not change. It changes you.
Of course as a band we wanted to 'make it' too and flirted with that until the day it all imploded...another story for another day perhaps. I would like to believe that most performers understand the symbiotic dance with audience, that circuit to which you allude. Mutaal witnessing is a lovely phrasing.
Your grounding observation is sharp and I am here thinking 'of course.' A lifetime of service has led me to the knowing that I must be 'able' to serve and so renewable Paul is a must. Off to recharge my batteries after another hospitality shift. Time for some cabin vibes.
Yes, the moment the circuit with the audience becomes secondary to the career machinery around it, something in the original current breaks. Not always but often enough to be a pattern worth naming.
“Renewable Paul” is the whole ethical framework in two words.
Enjoy the cabin!
Whenever this topic comes up, I remember Truman Capote’s biography. He had a deeply complicated relationship with his mother and father, and grew into someone highly sociable and hungry for attention. His longtime partner, Jack Dunphy, had a loving mother and was far more private himself. He cared about being recognised as a writer, of course, but he didn’t chase it. I see this pattern in many of my friends and acquaintances as well. People who grew up with one or two unreliable parents often carry these patterns with them. It’s hard not to notice once you see it.
Another thing I’ve noticed among them is how heavily they rely on karma and reciprocity. They constantly give compliments, and many come back to them in return. At one point, that was almost painful to watch because these are genuinely talented, good people, yet the eagerness with which they praise others can sometimes make the compliments feel hollow. That opens another question: what is the attention of an attention seeker worth? And if the attention seeker is the default human nowadays, what does that mean for the entire attention economy?
The Capote and Dunphy pairing is almost too perfect as a case study. Of course, it proves a rule but more than that, it illustrates the variable so cleanly. Same world, same circles, same literary ambitions, radically different relationships to being seen. The difference located, as you suggest, not in talent or intelligence but in the early experience of being reliably held.
Your question about the value of an attention-seeker’s attention unsettles me. If compliments are currency spent to generate return, they become a transaction dressed as generosity, and the recipient, however unconsciously, often senses the structure beneath the warmth. The praise feels slightly off, slightly eager, slightly too well-timed because the giving is essential. It has somewhere to go…. which leads to your larger question with dread: if reciprocal compliment exchange becomes the dominant grammar of attention, we end up in an economy of mutual inflation where the currency loses purchasing power entirely. Everyone is affirmed, nothing is believed, and real recognition becomes almost impossible to distinguish from the transactional one. We lose the ability to receive it cleanly even when it comes.
The default attention-seeker as the baseline human condition may mean we are collectively losing fluency in a register we haven’t yet named the loss of.
Thank you for the Capote example and the question! I needed that, Valentina.
Thank you for answering, Tamara. It really is unsettling, but there’s always room for hope that spontaneity and people who can stand being unpopular will prevail. :')
I agree! I am hopeful too.
An acquaintance of decades was always surrounded by people. Not necessarily because they like him, but it eventually emerged that he needed their attention to feed on, in huge quantities. Most Saturday evenings I was one of the many regularly invited. It became evident that invitees were required, so that he could hold court.
He was always the centre of attention. I met him through a friend, but to this day am not convinced he actually liked or respected me, or any of the others.
He scoffed at anyone who held a religious faith. He thought himself too intelligent & well-adjusted to need that.
As the years passed, my respect faded. As he soared the heights of an internationally recognised career, he became emotional distant from us. I increasingly found him obnoxious.
Where once he criticised guests for smoking, he now chain-smoked. He suddenly looked unhealthy, even old. A smile no longer settled on his face.
I concluded that he had no inner, self-contained peace. No soul. Just a shell.
He had become what a lifelong attention seeker becomes.
This is the long portrait my essay gestured toward, the trajectory rather than the snapshot. The Saturday evenings as tribute, the court requiring its audience out of structural necessity. And then the slow decline, the contradictions accumulating, the smoke, the hardened face, the smile that stopped finding anywhere to land.
The detail about religion is telling. Sorry, but it is! Contempt for faith often masks contempt for need itself, the refusal to acknowledge that something outside the self might be required to complete it. A man who scoffs at others kneeling is frequently a man terrified of his own knees.
Then no inner self-contained peace, just a shell…. is the destination I warn toward. When external confirmation becomes the only structure of a self, and the confirmation keeps arriving but stops nourishing, there is nothing left to fall back on. The audience was never going to be enough. It never is. But by the time that becomes clear, the capacity for solitude has often been spent.
Thank you for the long view, Russell! It’s fascinating!
No need to apologise for religion, Tamara. Prayer helped me survive after the loss of my family.
And I sometimes chuckle to myself when an atheist asserts with such ‘certainty’ that there is no living entity beyond our field of view.
In some ways, we can see no more than a fish in a tank in a room with one tiny window overlooking a brick wall. That fish can never know what is beyond.
Truth!
I have a friend like that. I’m reading this as a cautionary tale. :)
Negotiation with attention seeking is practically a rite of passage. Like many things, the psychic reward of attention threatens to traipse over the bluff into gluttony.
Of course, having read as many economics books as I have, I’m tempted to think of this phenomenon…well, economically. Particularly in the current era of the attention economy, where the desperation for the psychic reward often fosters the need to churn out “content” that is little more than what the nomenclature suggests. And yet, in spite of how debasing people may find it, there is a widespread audience for it. If the formula didn’t work, it would float dead in the water along with the endless cavalcade of ephemeral novelties churned out for a short-term profit, both figuratively and literally.
The problem is that, for a social species, attention also serves as a function of worth that one can only escape if, and only if, they have learned to survive by transcending social considerations, like an eremite or a pariah. Rarely, if ever, is this a choice. It’s not unlike a coyote chewing off a caught paw because it’s the only way to survive. In spite of what one might say about compensating or having learned to live without, they may simply be anesthetized to an absence to a degree. It’s very likely one who has thrown off the ornamental, yet burdensome, mantle of sociability sometimes sighs and looks back maudlin, as though mourning a dead god, who was at once both giver and oppressor, and the giver is the one who gets missed, and the oppressor is the one who gets forgotten (limerence works according to this fallacy: one may run away due to necessity, but the memory they retain is biased toward the nostalgic, particularly in their worst moments).
As for attention, one can be trained ideologically into antagonizing it as adolescent boys often do (like I did, to an extent). People who are spurned, whether or not it’s due to their own unconscious iniquities, can find some superficial succour in being the guy who needs no one; like a lonely rider. But the only reason there’s a Byronic romance with the lonely rider in the first place is because some observer gave him that name. Otherwise, there’s no validation.
For my part, I can be affable and gregarious. I’m an experienced performer; I can hold a room or a conversation, and as you age, you realize there’s art and decorum to it, and in some environments, you keep your mouth shut; and in some environments, you act as the life of the party. It’s the same way as bankers or day-traders who acknowledge the reward of money, but have learned to transcend its dominance and construe it, instead, as a commodity.
In those terms, attention-seeking can be a form of avarice. “Slut” works as an analog; so does “glutton”. In both cases, validation comes from a need for uncontrolled consumption. Spoken that way, it’s not the attention that’s the problem; it’s the sluthood!
Actually, the only quarrel I would have with the premise of this treatise is just that: how slut is defined in this case. Particularly if everyone is prone to attention-seeking. But in the same way everyone is prone to sex-seeking (with exceptions, just like attention), it’s the reason for the need to validate that’s at issue. I would imagine that, not unlike sex, you can survive without attention; but it probably isn’t healthy.
I can say that I feel very little motivation to communicate to an unreceptive world, so there could be two things at work here: either I’ve simply a diminished concept for the “intrinsic virtue” of writing or output; or it’s because a neurotic impulse compels me to put too much stake in the feedback of attention. I’m hoping it’s the latter.
“The only reason there’s a Byronic romance with the lonely rider is because some observer gave him that name.” That sentence does more philosophical work than most paragraphs I’ve read this month. Brilliant!!! The pose of needing no one is itself a performance requiring an audience to complete it, which means radical self-sufficiency is, structurally, one of the most attention-dependent positions available. The hermit needs witnesses to his hermitage.
The limerence parallel is precise in a way that unsettles me productively. Memory edited toward the giver, away from the oppressor, which means the nostalgia for social belonging, even when belonging was costly, always works from corrupted data. We don’t miss what it actually was. We miss the curated highlight reel our own psychology produced in its absence.
Your banker analogy reframes the entire question usefully. The problem was never the commodity — money, attention, sex — but the inability to absorb it without being consumed by the metabolising. Avarice as the failure of proportion rather than the presence of appetite. Which means the essay’s “slut” and your “glutton” are cousins pointing at the same underlying dysfunction: not wanting, but wanting without any internal governor on the wanting.
Your closing hope strikes me as exactly the right thing to hope for. The first is treatable by experience. The second is a much lonelier diagnosis.
Thank you, Ian, for bringing an argument that is layered and self-aware! But then… you always do!
I am humbled by your praise. Actually, you also gave me my attention fix. 🙃
Hmmm I’m your fixer!
Better than being thought of as a pusher. 🙃🫦
Ohhhhh the pusher would at least have better margins.
Then consider yourself a non-prophet enterprise.
There is more than one response to this essay for me. There is the response to the essay itself. And there is the response to the use of the word "slut."
I'll start with the word, because my reaction to the word was so strong, so intense, I almost didn't read the essay at all. And when I did, because I knew whatever word you used, it would be worth reading, I felt a deep heaviness as I read. Not just the first time, every time. I looked up the word, just to be sure of myself, and I was correct in thinking that the word was never used in any but a derogatory way. Never. It originally referred to a woman who was messy, dirty (with literal dirt), and/or dressed in a slovenly way. Depending on who wrote the definition, the sexual connotation of the word was recent-ish.
At one point you wrote "reclaiming the term 'attention-seeking slut' carries some subversive value. Not celebratory. But clarifying." I respectfully disagree. Whether you intend it or not, the word slut carries with it a derogatory intention. I was curious why my reaction was so intense around the word, and eventually I realised that if it was derogatory, and if you were right that we all participate in a certain amount of attention-seeking, then it meant you were being derogatory toward me, and that thought hurt very deeply. Of course I know that was and is not your intention at all. However, if I accept the word, than intended or not, I accept being named a word that in every connotation and variation (other than your new use of it) is derogatory toward me. And I do not accept that.
However, the ideas in the essay itself are not dependent on the word, so the rest of the essay can be discussed in terms of attention and attention-seeking vs. recognition. At first, when I read this I wanted to say that I spent much of my life trying to hide in plain sight, not to seek attention. And while that's true to a great extent, it doesn't mean I did nothing to seek attention. I think I did. And I don't know if this is the same or not, but when I look back, I think my attention-seeking was what you might call target-specific. There were certain people I respected or admired and I sought their attention. Often teachers, other adults, occasional fellow students. My focus was on their attention, not anyone's attention, and my behavior was targeted accordingly. I wasn't socially great going into my teens, and I had to work at being able to talk to people, especially adults. The positive attention that got as I improved, helped me to learn more and get better at it.
I appreciate "attention-seeking demands arrival...recognition arrives as consequence." Also of attention tending to be loud, where respect/recognition tends to be quiet, and the need for both of them, to some extent. The only thing I'm not sure I agree with is that only the attention brings the spark of joy of being delighted. I feel as if I've experienced that in the quieter moments of recognition as well, and that it meant even more to me in that context. But that may just be me.
What really interested me was at the beginning, the attention-seeking seemed to be attention for its own sake. Toward the end, attention-seeking becomes "the desire to matter beyond immediate circles persists. To contribute, resonate, ripple outward in some direction." To make a difference, to help others. And you lead into what you call "calibration rather than elimination. Learning to seek attention without selling oneself for it." It's what you described earlier in yourself - staying where it's not always comfortable, and continuing on.
When you write these essays, of course you want people to read them. But it's more than that, you want them to matter, to make people think. And you do! Reading the comments and the dialogue between you and your readers that is evident. In a way, you are the best argument for your own essay, the embodiment that "Somewhere between invisibility and exhibition, between respect sentiment and spotlight flicker, there exists a livable middle ground where attention becomes conversation rather than conquest." Maybe, as you say, you don't inhabit it consistently. You do, however, show us how it's done. Thank you for that!
I expected objection to the word. You are right about the etymology and that reclamation is never a unilateral act, the writer cannot simply declare a word redeemed and expect every reader to experience it that way. Language carries its history in the body before it reaches the mind, which is why your near-abandonment of my essay before reading it is not a failure of generosity on your part. It is language doing what language does, arriving with baggage no authorial intention can fully unpack at the door.
What I can say is that the discomfort was intentional, but your point forces me to ask whether intentional discomfort and unintentional harm can always be cleanly separated. I’m not certain they can. The subversive value I claimed for the reclamation may work differently depending on what the word has already cost the reader personally.
I like your distinction between target-specific attention-seeking and generalised performance . Seeking the regard of someone you really admire, a teacher, a mind worth impressing, is categorically different from broadcasting into an undifferentiated crowd hoping something has an impact. The first is aspiration with a face. The second is anxiety without an address.
Your observation that silent recognition can carry its own spark, that it can move us as deeply as applause, perhaps more durably, is a genuine correction to something I overstated.
Thank you, Doc, for staying with my essay despite the weight, and for disagreeing with such precision and care!
I appreciate so much your response to my comment, Tamara. To be clear, I don't feel any harm, unintentional or not, was done by your use of the word. My feelings were intense, and the heaviness was real, and it led me to learn something about myself. That I felt it was important not to accept what I perceived as a disparaging word, one for me to use about myself in how I go about my life, was a good thing for me to see and know about myself. Also, that I was willing to say that to you, who I deeply respect and care about, tells me how much I trust you to respond with the generosity and precision that you did. I learn so much from our conversations, about both of us. And I cherish that - and you.