Last week I watched a man at a coffee shop spend forty-five minutes staring out the window. No phone. No book. Just watching the street.
I almost felt sorry for him — then I caught myself. What if he was doing exactly what he needed to do?
The Attention Economy’s Revenge
We talk a lot about the attention economy: how platforms compete for our focus, how every scroll is a vote for what gets made next, how our cognitive surplus has been quietly monetized. What we talk about less is the inverse: what we lose when our attention is constantly captured.
The thing we lose, I think, is noticing.
Noticing is different from seeing. Seeing is passive — light enters the eye, the brain registers an object. Noticing is active. It means pausing long enough on a thing to ask: what’s interesting about this?
What Noticing Produces
The writers I love most are noticers. Joan Didion kept notebooks. John McPhee interviewed the same person for weeks. Annie Dillard spent a year watching a single creek and wrote a Pulitzer-winning book about it.
This isn’t nostalgia for a slower era. It’s a skill — one that can be practiced.
Some things I’ve found help:
Walk without headphones. Even once a week. Let your ears work.
Write one observation a day. Not an insight. Not a lesson. Just something you noticed. A detail. A texture. A mood.
Ask the second question. Most people ask one follow-up question in a conversation, then steer back to themselves. The good stuff — in interviews, in relationships, in ideas — comes from the third or fourth question.
The Man at the Window
I never did find out what he was thinking about. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
But I’ve thought about him more than I’ve thought about most things I’ve read this month. And I think that’s the point.
The world rewards output. But output comes from input — and real input requires presence, attention, and the willingness to just look at the window for a while.