Once attention expands to co-inhabit a place, it resists narrowing again.
Evidence
When we arrived back to our apartment, it felt different to me—less like the center of things. Instead the street was full of such “centers,” and each one contained other lives, other rooms, other people turning in for the night and worrying their own worries for the next day. Of course I had already accepted all of this in an abstract sense, but it wasn’t felt. And as silly as this story may sound to anyone who is used to knowing their neighbors, I find it worthwhile to recount because it bears out what I’ve experienced with other expansions of attention: they’re hard to reverse. When something goes from being an idea to a reality, you can’t easily force your perception back into the narrow container it came from. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 464
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s central thesis: attention is the faculty by which we constitute a world — expansion of attention permanently reshapes that world.
- DEEPTHINKING: The irreversibility claim — perception cannot be forcibly narrowed once expanded — is a dense, paradigm-shifting point about how attention constitutes world rather than merely captures it.
Related
- Attention constitutes reality and remaking it remakes the self (similarity 0.82)
- Attention duration and quality expand perceptual granularity (similarity 0.79)
- Attention is the faculty by which we constitute social and ethical reality (similarity 0.78)
- Patterns of attention determine what reality feels possible to us. (similarity 0.78)