How to reclaim your attention from our tech overlords
A simple way to fend off the “colonizers of consciousness”
I’m embarrassed to admit that even after all these years of meditation (and even going on many, many long retreats), I still frequently multitask during daily activities. I’ll catch myself watching TV while I eat, or listening to a podcast while putting away laundry or brushing my teeth.
But whenever I actually remember to stop the noise and simply be mindful, it makes the tasks, and my whole life, much better.
The writer Michael Pollan refers to this as “the sacredness of the everyday.” According to him, practicing this kind of presence isn’t just a life-enhancement tool; it’s a revolutionary act. We live in an era where powerful forces are working overtime to hijack our attention. (Pollan calls them the “colonizers of consciousness.”) When you can remember to stay mindful, you reclaim your attention—in effect, you take back your own mind.
To help with this, Pollan shares a simple mantra he “stole” from meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein:
“Just this.”
You can drop that phrase into your mind while you’re doing the dishes or eating your food. It serves as a gentle nudge to stop the mental time-traveling and reconnect with the raw data of your physical sensations.
Michael Pollan is out with a new book on consciousness. Check out our podcast episode, where we talked about: how to reduce rumination, how to get over yourself, the value of MDMA-assisted therapy, and more.
Also out today is my episode with Harvard Business School professor Leslie John on building trust, reducing regret, and the underrated power of oversharing.
Over on the 10% with Dan Harris app:
Tomorrow (Tuesday, March 3 at 4 p.m. ET) I’m going live with Teacher of the Month Sebene Selassie for a guided meditation and Q&A on Zoom. Drop your questions for us in the event post on the app here.
And later this month, join the Even You Can Meditate Challenge! From March 23–27, we’ll be dropping a new meditation from Sebene each day. The Challenge is a kind of sampler, showcasing five different types of meditation. It’s designed to introduce beginners to a variety of styles, as well as inspire regular meditators who may want to shake things up.
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Beautiful to hear you both speaking to each other.
This episode lands well on the mechanics of attention, but it stays on the surface of what attention is.
The conversation frames distraction as structural and trainable, which is useful, but it never touches the deeper layer: the fact that attention sits on top of systems we don’t fully understand, from subjective experience to developmental neurobiology.
I would also love a richer discussion acknowledging Chalmers’ hard problem, the gap between neural activity and felt experience, and how any attempt to “reclaim attention” depends on whether we’re talking about functional control or the phenomenology of awareness. It also would have benefited from Dennett’s “competence without comprehension,” because so much of our attentional life is driven by sub-personal processes that know how to act long before we consciously understand anything. That’s the real battleground with technology: it targets the layers beneath comprehension.
And then there’s emergence. Human attention doesn’t appear fully formed; it develops through scaffolding, co-regulation, and the slow construction of executive function.
Understanding when and how attention becomes something we can actually reclaim would have grounded the conversation in neuroscience and human development.
The episode is a great listen, but it’s missing the philosophical and developmental architecture that makes attention more than a set of habits.
Maybe a part 2, please?
You guys are great, thank you!
—Johan
This is such an impressive line-up!