'My experience is what I agree to attend to'
- Samantha M. Amarante
- 14 de mai.
- 4 min de leitura
Atualizado: 14 de mai.
It's been a while. Perfectionism kept convincing me I had nothing relevant enough to say. And then, two weeks ago when I started to write this text — perfectionism came along for that too.
I don't mean to make you lose time reading something irrelevant, but it would be too pretentious to think I could write something so good. Once we all agree I'm not able to such prodigy, so let me take a shortcut to the title instead. Attend has the same root as the word attention — to direct one's attention to something;
William James said that sentence in the title in 1890, without even imagining the amount of information we would be surrounded by in digital times. And I keep thinking about it.
He argues that "experience" is not the passive reception of everything around us. We are not sponges. Experience is only what we agree to attend to. The opposite — the non-experience — is what he calls "gray chaotic indiscriminateness." Distraction, in one word.
I'm not sure whether most of the content we consume is actually adding quality to our lives. But I am fairly certain about the time we spend on it. Which means — if I'm calculating this correctly — if most of this content is not really valid, most of the hours our phones report as "screen time" were simply... wasted.
Given the generalized burnout state of the working class nowadays, I don't think time is something we can afford to waste carelessly. So maybe the question worth asking isn't what did I watch this week — but what did I actually let in?
These are a few of the things I let in.
Mitski
Mitski is an artist who seems to have a lot in common with me. She has everything I value: deepness, female rage, a complex and fussy mind, and a lot of feelings. All these characteristics, combined with the "alternative" label, would have made her a natural idol for me.
But for a long time, I didn't find her anything but a little weird.
About two years ago, when I still had an Instagram profile, I started creating a post about My Love Mine All Mine — a song that had caught my attention for its sheer amount of sentimentality and cuteness. After losing myself in the reflection of the lyrics, my YouTube algorithm brought me an interview in which Mitski explained why she wrote the song. After that, it claimed its place on my 2024 Spotify retrospective.
Instead of telling you what it's about, I'll leave it here — and offer you the chance to sit with it yourself before watching her speak about it.
(Às vezes uma música chega antes das palavras. Deixa ela chegar. E prestar atenção sem entender tudo — isso também é experiência. James concordaria.)
Where's my phone?
The piece of Mitski's work that actually brought me to write, though, wasn't as gentle.
Where's My Phone is full of self-consciousness in such a reversed way that it becomes almost comic. She consciously craves her phone — not out of habit, but out of intention. She wants to dive into the alienation the device provides, to escape hard feelings. Like the fact that someone insulted her on the street.
And she does it angrily. You can hear that in the rocky keys she chose to open the song.
There's something both honest and a little devastating about naming that impulse so clearly. Most of us reach for the phone without noticing. She noticed — and reached for it anyway.
Brainrot - e o quê a ciência tem a dizer
Talking about alienation: shortly after, I came across a video that set out to explain the accuracy of the "brainrot" concept.
(Você conhece essa expressão? Brainrot — literalmente, "apodrecimento do cérebro" — é um termo usado para descrever o estado mental causado pelo consumo excessivo de conteúdo aleatório e de baixa qualidade na internet.
Foi eleita a palavra do ano de 2024 pelo Oxford Dictionary.)
The video made me think — in a very thoughtful way — about two things I'd love to know your opinion on: attention span and agency.
Do you know this vocabulary? I'd love to hear what you think about the topic.
O Paradoxo da escolha
And then, Atila Iamarino caught my attention with a title I couldn't scroll past.
(Atila é um dos meus divulgadores científicos favoritos em português. O vídeo dele não está em inglês — mas o tema ficou martelando na minha cabeça até eu encontrar um equivalente que explica a mesma lógica com ótimos exemplos e gráficos.)
The topic: the mental load of making basic choices in modern life. We make hundreds of small decisions every day before we even get to the important ones — and that has a cost. A real, measurable cost.
Voltando ao James — e ao que ele teria dito se estivesse aqui hoje.
If experience is what we choose to attend to, then distraction isn't just a bad habit. It's a quiet way of opting out of our own lives.
That's a heavy thought.
But it also means the opposite is possible: every time we choose what to pay attention to — a song, an idea, a conversation, a feeling we'd rather avoid — we're shaping what our experience actually is.
I'm still figuring out what I want mine to look like.
(E se este texto te pareceu difícil em algum momento — tudo bem. Você já está aqui. Isso também conta.)
Samantha
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