In every classroom and every home there is a tension that is hard to name. We live in an age in which almost everything is potentially accessible: information, tools, stimuli, possibilities. It is an unexpected abundance, right at our fingertips. And yet, paradoxically, this very abundance seems to drain the energy needed to choose a direction, to commit, to sustain a path.
The result is a contradiction that parents and teachers witness every day: young people full of potential who struggle to find focus and motivation. It is not a crisis of intelligence, but a crisis of attention, understood in the broadest sense.
When we speak of "attention," we don't just mean the ability to stay focused on a task, but a set of abilities:
- to select what matters,
- to resist distractions,
- to remain oriented in one direction over time,
- to discern what deserves effort and what doesn't.
It is a superpower because it orients everything else: desires, skills, relationships, life trajectory. And today it is under attack.
Studying, growing and developing passions requires something that now feels almost countercultural: slow, steady, repetitive work; an effort whose benefits are not immediate; the maturity to move beyond instant gratification. These are difficult practices, ascetic in the most essential sense of the word: they require training, renunciation, consistency. And like any ascetic practice, they are uncomfortable at first and opaque in their long-term results. But without them, no truly formative competence can exist.
Our task is not to make everything fun (or, as we often hear, “a game,” as though playfulness could solve everything), but to give meaning to the effort, illuminating what the student cannot yet see and guiding them until their curiosity and skill become strong enough to stand on their own.
Let's explore how.
Attention is an ascetic practice
In the collective imagination, motivation is a spark: an impulse, a moment of inspiration. But without a minimum of discipline, that spark burns out quickly. You cannot motivate a student without stating a simple truth: attention is a muscle, it must be trained, and at the beginning it hurts:
It seems that the power of attention does not lie in looking, but in the ability to stop looking, to turn one's gaze away, placing it on what is less obvious, to interrupt a cycle of thoughts and perceptions. (B. Lotto, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently)
Simone Weil goes even further:
Something in our soul has an even stronger repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for physical fatigue. (Waiting for God)
Music, sports, drawing, mathematics, writing… any formative passion becomes enjoyable only after an initial period in which difficulty tends to be interpreted as failure. Today adolescents give up at this critical point more than in the past: because they expect ease, because they associate frustration with a lack of talent, because they mistake a slow beginning for a personal limitation.
The educational role consists precisely in reframing this phase as an initiation, with effort as the gateway.
The question becomes: how do we invite someone into an ascetic practice? One first answer comes from the title of a book: teaching requires an erotics, in the sense that a teacher is "one who knows how to make new worlds exist, who knows how to turn knowledge into an object of desire capable of setting life in motion and widening its horizon" (from the back cover).
But to fully grasp this, we need to understand what has changed in the cultural context we inhabit.
The beginner bubble effect and the illusion of ease
The digital world offers a paradox: it puts everything within reach, yet it flattens our sense of real difficulty, giving beginners the illusion of mastery.
In a matter of seconds, one can watch tutorials and hyper-simplified content accompanied by superficial rewards in the form of dopamine hits. Initial progress seems immediate, even in complex activities. Offline, however, learning is slow, progress is often invisible, and boredom and frustration inevitably emerge. This creates the beginner’s bubble: going from 0 to 1 is quick and gratifying; going from 1 to 2 is slow, imperceptible, and frustrating. When the bubble bursts, many convince themselves that they are “just not good at it.”
The sensation of digital mastery produces an expectation of ease that reality simply refuses to meet. And when reality resists, the collapse is harsh.
It's helpful here to share an interesting testimony I found under this article, because it captures this dynamic perfectly:
I taught guitar lessons 10-15 years ago. It was during the apex of the guitar hero video game craze for those of you who remember. Students were signing up like crazy for lessons, often egged on by parents who were ecstatic that their kid might be showing some musical promise. There's just one problem. Guitar Hero games were (like most video games) designed to be mastered in about two weeks time with a little focused effort. Learning to play an actual guitar is a slow, methodical, awkward, painful, years-long process. Once students realized playing an actual musical instrument was going to be much harder than mastering the video game version, they usually came to a rapid conclusion along the lines of, "this just isn't my talent."
But the digital sphere has another consequence: the infinite possibilities shown by algorithms generate a kind of disorientation. We desire a thousand things at once - often incompatible with one another - losing any clear sense of priority, and our perception of real life becomes distorted by an unlimited potential reality.
A simple digital detox, if well guided, is not a miracle cure, but it can restore a sense of proportion. It helps young people return to more authentic desires. And this points toward the need to shape choices intentionally, because we now have far more to renounce (with deep implications, even in relationships).
Macro-focus and micro-focus: two complementary forms of attention
To navigate a world of infinite stimuli, we need to distinguish two forms of attention:
- Macro-focus: choosing what deserves effort and suffering, the underlying direction.
- Micro-focus: sustaining, day after day, the work required to realize that direction; the simple, repetitive daily activities.
There must be a basic coherence between these two types of attention, without turning rigidity into a value: many lives have reinvented themselves, but, aside from lottery wins, the success of those who manage to change direction is built on years of effort and complementary learning.
Students often lack the first and struggle with the second: they don't know why they should study (macro), nor how to do it every day (micro). Macro-focus requires uncomfortable questions:
- What kind of person do you want to become?
- Which skills will open life up for you in 5–10 years?
- What makes you feel alive or curious?
Micro-focus, on the other hand, needs solid habits: simple routines, daily goals, reduction of noise. Without the macro, micro-focus sinks into distraction, while macro-focus is unreachable without daily perseverance.
To this we can add a cultural element: the pessimistic view of the future, the loss of meaning, and a school system that often presents content without embodying it. Many students don’t find a reason to commit because they perceive the world as already decided, with no space for their presence.
In schools we create virtual learning environments for our children, which they recognize as artificial and unworthy of their full attention. Without the opportunity to learn with their hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passion for learning will not be stirred. (D. Stowe, The Wisdom of Our Hands)
Reconnecting this separation is essential, but another ingredient is needed: the ability to dwell in slowness.
Living the tension between otium and acedia
Boredom has always been the cradle of ideas, but today we have lost the art of it. Otium — fertile, reflective, generative free time — is now rare. It has been replaced by acedia: a confused inner emptiness, a paralysis disguised as rest, a "discarded" time that serves only to recover from work so that we can return more performant than before. A free time that remains stingy with questions because it no longer has value in itself, but only in relation to the productive time it is set against.
Overstimulation, hyperconnection, imposed desires, fragmentation of time… everything pushes us toward a form of structural acedia. It should be understood more as a symptom than as a fault: it indicates that something within us is asking for a change of rhythm, that we are living desires that are not truly ours.
We should explain this to young people and help them discover otium as a space in which desires are purified, a place to seek every day, at least as long as the time of youth allows it.
A powerful remedy is the presence of slow, long-term projects capable of creating a narrative arc longer than a single day. And then there's the secret: otium is sterile if lived alone, especially at the beginning; finding allies of the spirit is the priority for changing the rhythm of a life.
This dance between otium and acedia can be taught. And it prepares us for the deepest dimension of motivation: relationship.
Curiosity as a relational force
We often tell adolescents: “Follow your passions.” But passions at that age are often mimetic, shaped by peers, influencers, algorithms, parents. René Girard would say:
“We desire what others desire.”
But curiosity too is therefore relational, and it needs two conditions in order to be fulfilled:
- Differentiation: feeling that the path you are following is "yours," recognizable, full of meaning.
- Integration: having a context that confirms you, encourages you, gives you back a sense of value.
On this second point the responsibility of teachers and parents is enormous, because we are fighting against an individualistic society with the aim of making external stimuli and feedback regain priority over "pure" will.
Paul Graham puts it clearly:
The way to figure out what to work on is by working. [...] Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. (How to Do Great Work)
And so we should stop expecting curiosity to precede effort and begin teaching that effort also creates curiosity.
Exposing the attention economy
Complicating everything is the attention economy. It's not just about smartphones and notifications: it's a cultural environment that rewards the instantaneous, the ephemeral, the fragmentary. Speed — or rather, acceleration — becomes a value in itself. The result is an increasing difficulty in staying with what requires time, in dwelling within complexity:
Distractibility is the mental equivalent of obesity (Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head)
So how can we help a young person? The first step is subtraction: reduce the noise, build a filter, choose a few priorities and sustain them over time. Teach that choosing means renouncing and that renunciation is an act of maturity, against the modern tendency to keep all doors open.
A focused life is a form of freedom, as well as a poor client of the attention economy.
Reclaiming wonder
Beyond psychology, beyond pedagogy, there is a subtler dimension: the way we interpret the world. For decades, we have privileged an analytical, cataloging approach, which has proven useful, yet incomplete. We have lost the ability to see connections, emotional resonances, the living meaning of content.
Max Weber spoke of disenchantment of the world: we cannot reverse this process on our own (although something is beginning to shift in limine), but we can offer a testimony of meaning, a way of living that gives depth to desires.
The decisive difference is between thin desires, fed from the outside, and thick desires, rooted in values that emerge through relationships. We therefore have a great opportunity: to distinguish between what is genuinely a source of autonomy and creativity, and what is potentially an artificial surrogate. And even if it is true, as Bernanos writes, that "modern civilization is a universal conspiracy against every inner life" (La France contre les robots), we also see around us many luminous testimonies to the contrary. Let's not give up.
Attention in the age of AI
This discussion becomes even more urgent in the era of artificial intelligence: we live alongside systems that produce text, images, code, music, solutions. Systems that simulate attention without possessing it: they do not experience boredom, they do not struggle against the resistance of the world, they do not grow through frustration.
Yet the language of AI unintentionally reminds us of something profound. The Transformer model — the foundation of GPT and most modern AI — is based on a mechanism called attention, and one paper has become legendary in computer science: Attention Is All You Need.
For a machine, attention is a mathematical operation that weights the relevance of information; for humans, it is an existential choice. AI can generate infinite alternatives with zero effort, and the risk for us is to conform to this process of mechanization. But it is also an opportunity to remind ourselves what truly sets us apart: a meditative thought capable of a creativity that attributes meaning.
A path in five movements
Let us conclude with a summary in five simple directions of work:
- Train attention like a muscle, with simple rituals and a vision of the new worlds it can open, knowing that effort is necessary and will be rewarded (not necessarily by the world, but by our own growth)
- Connect macro-focus and micro-focus, providing deep reasons and everyday tools.
- Cultivate otium and fight laziness, creating spaces of slowness in which to nurture projects at a human pace and spiritual alliances.
- Nurture relational curiosity, through contexts of recognition and positive models, in continuous exchange with the environment around us.
- Offer a horizon of meaning capable of sustaining desires rooted in values.
Attention is our superpower because it shapes what we see, what we learn, what we become. To use a hyperbole, we could say that ultimately we are what we pay attention to. Teaching it today means offering young people a compass to build a life worth living. And perhaps, who knows, even to fill it with love.
