I’ve done some more work on the ‘voice print’ I developed last year. Effectively a two page prompt characterising the main features of my writing style. I’m not going to use this but I wanted to see if it could be done. In part because I assume other people must be doing this and more will join them in future. I think this reads like something I could easily have written myself 👇
Amidst the cascading crises and incessant distractions of the present moment, a growing chorus of voices is calling for us to reclaim our capacity for deep, sustained, transformative engagement with the world around us. Two thinkers I’ve found especially illuminating on this theme are L.M. Sacasas, a technology critic who blogs at The Convivial Society, and Hans Loewald, a 20th century psychoanalyst and theorist.
Sacasas has written eloquently about what he calls the “ethics of attention” in a digital age. For Sacasas, the quality of our attention—the distinctive way we direct our consciousness and engage with our surroundings—is not just a matter of personal productivity or mental hygiene, but an existential and ethical imperative. “Attention,” he writes in a recent essay, “is the measure of the quality of our consciousness and the perceived thickness and richness of the world.”
Drawing on thinkers like Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and Albert Borgmann, Sacasas makes the case for an attentional orientation characterized by patient, receptive, unhurried presence—a stance of “waiting on the world in the spirit of invitation.” This kind of attention, he suggests, “elicits more of the world” and “more of us.” By attending closely and openly, we stretch and deepen our own consciousness while also drawing out the latent meanings and marvels of our environment. Attentiveness, in this view, is a reciprocal act, a gesture of hospitality that invites the world to disclose itself more fully.
Sacasas is acutely concerned with how our current technological milieu—characterized by constant connectivity, ubiquitous surveillance, algorithmically-curated content feeds, and the incessant pressure to optimize and monetize every moment—undermines our capacity for this kind of reverent, receptive engagement:
“Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate…In this way of relating to the world we forfeit the ‘sheer entertainment value’ of views, sounds, and smells, of the world as an inexhaustible source of wonder and meaning independent of our designs.”
For Sacasas, the stakes of our attentional crisis are nothing less than the texture and vitality of lived experience itself. When we lose the ability to attend carefully and caringly, we risk inhabiting an affectively and spiritually impoverished world—a world reduced to a set of resources to be optimized and extracted, rather than a reality to be encountered and explored.
While Sacasas’ approach is grounded in an incisive critique of contemporary technology, the psychoanalytic perspective of Hans Loewald offers a complementary lens for understanding the depths and difficulties of engaged perception. Loewald was preoccupied with the developmental trajectory from the undifferentiated unity of infantile experience to the structured, “secondary process” reality of healthy adulthood. For Loewald, maturation entails a kind of “working through” of early psychic life, in which the intense affects and fantasies of childhood are not simply repressed or dissociated but gradually integrated into the more stable architecture of the adult mind.
When this process of integration fails or falters, Loewald suggests, we risk falling into a state of “deadening insulation from the unconscious”—a defensive stance that cuts us off from the vitalizing wellsprings of fantasy and feeling. In this state, symbolized by the rigid, repressive structure of neurosis, “human life and language are no longer vibrant and warmed by [the] fire” of the unconscious; instead, we find ourselves in a “desiccated, meaningless, passionless world.”
For Loewald, psychoanalysis offered a potential path out of this deadened condition, a way of re-linking past and present, “body and world, fantasy and reality.” Through the charged medium of the transference relationship, he believed, analysands could begin to recuperate the “passionate intensity” of early psychic life and reintegrate it into the more structured, sublimated world of adulthood. In this way, ghosts might become ancestors, and the present might be enriched rather than haunted by the past.
What links Sacasas’ reflections on technology and attention with Loewald’s psychoanalytic insights is a shared sense of the existential precarity of vital, meaningful engagement with the world. For both thinkers, our capacity to attend closely, caringly, and creatively depends on a delicate balance between receptivity and structure, openness and stability, passion and constraint. And for both, the forces of modern life—whether technological or psychic—often seem to conspire against this balance, pulling us toward a flattened, disenchanted experience cut off from the lively, unruly energies that animate human existence.
Mark Carrigan 