The Search Tax

Do you ever reach the end of the day and wish you had spent your attention differently?

I have these days often. I remember as a kid hearing variations of the phrase “57 channels and nothin’ on”, often with a larger number than “the Boss” originally wrote about in 1992. It often referred to the abundance of television channels available via satellite, but when you would sit down to find something to watch, nothing would pique your interest. I was watching a video from Hank Green today that put a couple of small ideas in my head that made me think a little more deeply about why these feelings are more persistent. I thought of an analogy and a set of vocabulary that helps clarify what I feel are the parts of the problem and how they interact.

I often say “we have a finite, unknowable amount of time.” I started to think of time as a sort of abstract generator, always on, always running. It will continue to run, non-stop until I run out of time. I can’t save the output of this generator up in a battery for later, I must use it immediately.

One of the things Hank was talking about is attention. He calls himself a “science communicator”, and as such deals in the business of attention. Attention, to me, is how I think of what I focus on. I feel like I can only focus on one thing at a time. So in my analogy, attention is the sort of circuit that I connect my generator to. I can only connect my generator to one circuit at a time. Further, I have to connect my generator to something at all times. Doing nothing isn’t actually an option.

There are lots of things I can attend to at any given moment¹. When I connect the generator to the right circuit, it feels good. When I don’t, it leads to that regretful feeling at the end of the day. What is right, I think, is about aligning my attention with my present desire. I don’t think it is productive to imagine certain circuits as more valuable than others in an absolute or hierarchical sense. It all depends.

Now for the rub. The time spent between realizing that I desire to attend to something and finding that something to attend to. Searching for something to focus on can be expensive. In fact, searching itself is a circuit. I find it difficult to believe that I ever want to search for something to pay attention to. That is rarely the goal. I tend to think of the vast sea of ideas as a key space to be exhausted. I think exhausted is the right word.

I have an idea that the ratio between searching and attending to a task can explain feelings like being in a state of flow or terrible ennui. Outside of research scenarios (e.g. “I want to come up with ideas for where to visit on a vacation” or “I want to research the kind of toaster to buy”), the ratio of search to attention to a task is directly correlated with frustration. The less search the better, generally. And I think flow is a way to describe when you arrive at a balance that feels good.

A word that Hank mentions in his video is salient. I think this is a great word because it is specifically about how attractive an idea is in terms of how successful it is at garnering attention. Sometimes, the thing I want to do isn’t the most salient thing I will find in the key space. This makes the search difficult to perform, which is directly detrimental to my goal of attending to a thing. I had a thought that there is something fundamental to how salient an idea is and our own survival instincts we’ve evolved with that adds challenge to the entire system of finding something to pay attention to that aligns with your current desires and values.

The combination of the unresting generator that is time, the requirement to attend to something, and the challenge of searching the key space of ideas creates a sort of mental treadmill. I think everyone understands this for the most part, and I think systems like recommendation engines and social media algorithms exploit this system incredibly. In fact, I think that really helps me understand how they work more deeply. The key space we are frequently searching is large, and growing. Recommendation engines sort the key space in such a way that often reduces the amount of time spent searching. However, I think they optimize for salience, not alignment with my desire.

The terms generator, circuit, and key space have helped me grapple with this system a little more effectively, though they don’t resolve the underlying frustration. The generator runs tomorrow too, but “57 channels and nothin’ on” finally has some machinery underneath it. I feel like connecting that old frustration to an ever-present driving force makes it feel more manageable than ever.