The Great Attention Game launches

You can chart the exact point I read Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, one of the books that inspired The Great Attention Game, in my social media postings.

 

I spent an entire summer holiday, in France, reading it tucked in the corner of our tiny mobile home whilst the family flapped about, griping about the constant bumping of elbows and bottoms and noting, hilariously, how I didn't need a book to teach me how to do nothing.

 

Despite a scene packed summer, my next Instagram post, the picture below, was January the following year.

 

I did need to read this book, despite what the kids thought.

 

I learned that where we place our attention matters. And most of those places are not of our own choosing.

 

Caught up in empty moments, the attention economy thrives by feeding our fleeting interest whilst starving our deepest needs. 

 

Most people don't even realise they are playing an attention game, less still that they are losing.

 

In the short term, social media can be an annoying distraction stealing precious moments, but in the longer term, it undermines our capacity for reflection and self-regulation, and even stops us from living the lives we want.

 

"Making it harder to want what we want to want" as Jenny Odell quotes the philosopher Harry Frankfurt.

 

The Great Attention Game, which rewards folk with free books for getting outdoors, is a playful way to draw our focus back.

 

I've spent the past few weeks hiding reward codes in plain sight, in green spaces around Leeds, from down near the M62 up to Harrogate, Ilkley & Otley and everywhere in between, including some leafier parts of the City Centre. 

 

After living here for almost 20 years, I thought I knew the city, especially its green lungs, and still, each day, I've been awed; the spectacular panorama of Baildon Moor, the flickering evening light over St Aidens marshes, the boulder-strewn hillside below the Cow & Calf and the heartstoppingly close stream of deer in Harewood.

 

Out here we find the time and space to work through our thoughts and feelings, or as Claire Nelson, author of Things I Learned from Falling, says, "Walking helps metabolise my emotion."

 

Reading and walking are powerful ways of being; they help us reconnect with what's really important.

 

All you have to do is go for a wander, find a reward code, scan it and choose a book.

 

Happy hunting!