I read this part about different forms of attention in the book Stolen Focus:

I landed into a freakishly warm Russian winter. There was no snow on the ground, and people were wearing T-shirts and selling off their fur coats for a pittance. As I strolled through the eerily snowless streets, I felt tiny and disorientated. Everything in Moscow is massive—people live in enormous concrete lumps of apartment blocks, and they work in ugly fortresses, and they trudge between them across eight-lane highways. The city is designed to make the collective seem vast and to make you, the individual, feel like a speck on the wind. James was living in a nineteenth-century Moscow apartment block, and as we sat in front of a huge bookcase filled with Russian classics, I felt like I had stumbled into a Tolstoy novel. He was living there partly because his wife worked for the World Health Organization, and partly because he loved Russian culture and philosophy. He told me that after years of studying focus, he has come to believe that attention takes three different forms—all of which are now being stolen. When we went through them, it clarified for me a lot of what I had learned so far.

The first layer of your attention, he said, is your spotlight. This is when you focus on “immediate actions,” like, “I’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.” You want to find your glasses. You want to see what’s in the fridge. You want to finish reading this chapter of my book. It’s called the spotlight because—as I explained earlier—it involves narrowing down your focus. If your spotlight gets distracted or disrupted, you are prevented from carrying out near-term actions like these.

The second layer of your attention is your starlight. This is, he says, the focus you can apply to your “longer-term goals—projects over time.” You want to write a book. You want to set up a business. You want to be a good parent. It’s called the starlight because when you feel lost, you look up to the stars, and you remember the direction you are traveling in. If you become distracted from your starlight, he said, you “lose sight of the longerterm goals.” You start to forget where you are headed.

The third layer of your attention is your daylight. This is the form of focus that makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place. How do you know you want to write a book? How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? Without being able to reflect and think clearly, you won’t be able to figure these things out. He gave it this name because it’s only when a scene is flooded with daylight that you can see the things around you most clearly. If you get so distracted that you lose your sense of the daylight, James says, “In many ways you may not even be able to figure out who you are, what you wanted to do, [or] where you want to go.”

He believes that losing your daylight is “the deepest form of distraction,” and you may even begin “decohering.” This is when you stop making sense to yourself, because you don’t have the mental space to create a story about who you are. You become obsessed with petty goals, or dependent on simplistic signals from the outside world like retweets. You lose yourself in a cascade of distractions. You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mindwandering, and deep thought. James has come to believe that our attention crisis is depriving us of all three of these forms of focus. We are losing our light.

He also said a different metaphor might further help us to understand this. Sometimes, hackers decide to attack a website in a very specific way. They get an enormous number of computers to try to connect to a website all at once—and by doing this, they  “overwhelm its capacity for managing traffic, to the point where it can’t be accessed by anyone else, and it goes down.” It crashes. This is called a “denial-of-service attack.” James thinks we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds. “We’re that server, and there’s all these things trying to grab our attention by throwing information at us…. It undermines our capacity for responding to anything. It leaves us in a state of either distraction, or paralysis.” We are so inundated “that it fills up your world, and you can’t find a place to get a view on all of it and realize that you’re so distracted and figure out what to do about it. It can just colonize your entire world,” he said. You are left so depleted that “you don’t get the space to push back against it.” 

I left James’s apartment and walked the streets of the Russian capital, and I began to wonder if there is, in fact, a fourth form of attention. I would call it our stadium lights—it’s our ability to see each other, to hear each other, and to work together to formulate and fight for collective goals. I could see a creepy example of what happens when this is lost unfolding all around me. I was in Moscow in winter, and people were walking around outside in T-shirts because it was so warm. A heat wave was just starting in Siberia—a sentence I never thought I would write. The climate crisis couldn’t be clearer—Moscow itself, ten years before, had been choked by the smoke from severe wildfires. But there is very little climate activism in Russia, nor—given the scale of the crisis—anywhere in the world. Our attention is occupied with other, less important things. I knew I was more guilty of this than most—I thought about my own horrendous carbon emissions.