Your Priceless Attention

In the Deep with Catherine Ingram

Host Catherine Ingram explores the concept of attention as a precious commodity being aggressively captured by powerful industries. Through

Key takeaways

• Attention is a valuable commodity subject to intense capture by powerful industries.
• The modern expectation for speed can lead to addiction-like impatience and agitation.

Main topics

• Attention economy
• Mindfulness and slowness

Notable quotes

Your attention, what you're paying attention to, is conditioning the very experience you're having of this life.

Conclusion

The episode encourages listeners to reclaim their agency by intentiona

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:19) Welcome to In the Deep. I'm your host, Katherine Ingram. The following Zoom session occurred on September 6th, 2026, and originated from Victoria, Australia. It's called Your Priceless Attention. Speaker 4 (0:46) We're living in a time whereby our attention has become the commodity, certainly one of the most valuable commodities in the world. And we have the most powerful industries vying for our attention. And there has probably never been any more powerful. Speaker 4 (1:12) coercion in history for accomplishing the capture of our attention. Most of us know this. We're watching it, even if it's not your direct experience, and lucky for you if it isn't, but we're watching it. We're watching the capture of attention and the way that it is a new form of addiction and the speed of it. is another, I mean, it's changing our brains, actually. There's a kind of expectation for speed that we get very addicted to, so that we get very impatient, we get agitated if it's not happening at the speed we want. This is, of course, very new in history. It's even new in my own lifetime. And out of all of this vying for attention, with all these... very powerful mediums and companies backed by billions of dollars. My recommendation is for you to be the highest bidder for your attention, for you to understand that you control your attention. Speaker 4 (2:41) And to really take that quite seriously. Because your attention, as I have said hundreds of times, your attention, what you're paying attention to, is conditioning the very experience you're having of this life. Whatever you're paying attention to, that's giving you the experience. One time I was, it was in 1993. It's quite a ways back. I was in a major heartbreak, big time, big story, totally just obsessed. Someone had left me, and I happened to be living on Maui for eight months at that point. And at the end of each day, my group of friends there, we would meet at this particular beach called Hoʻokipa, where the big turtles often were swimming and where lots of people would be windsurfing. Very magnificent place. And I was going there to go for a swim with my friends. And I'm in my very sad story the whole way there, because it was going all the time. And then there I was in the ocean, I'm swimming in this perfect temperature water on a beautiful Maui day. And it occurred to me, like, I said to myself, well, is this okay? Is this moment okay? And I thought, yeah, yeah, this is okay. And I thought, where else would I be if I could just have my druthers? Like, would I want to be with that? in that relationship and I actually pictured it. I pictured where I would be, which it happened to be where he was. It was an extremely cold place. It rained all the time. And I was kind of picturing all of that. Speaker 4 (4:46) I said to myself, just for that little moment, I popped out of my misery. And I let myself have the experience. I'm swimming with the turtles in this perfect ocean on this perfect day with my friends, right? Now, fortunately, I... have entrained myself to have a lot of those kinds of moments. A lot of times when I'm grumbling about something in my heart, where I'm wanting the world to be different, where I'm looking at what's happening and one could create quite a list of things we don't particularly like. And then I realize, not every time, but a lot of times, I know that I am spending my attention moments, and frankly, at my age, I'm aware that, you know, who knows how many are left. I'm spending down those moments, perhaps in unnecessary suffering. Now, not all... Sad times are, in my view, what I would call unnecessary. Some heartbreaks, some losses, some difficulties. You just have to feel it. You just have to live with it. Let the grief be there. Let the loss break your heart again. But a lot of what we're suffering... Speaker 4 (6:20) A great deal is in pure imagination. What if, and if only, and wish that hadn't happened. The injustices. If there's something we can do about it, of course, well and good, but a lot of it we can't. And we're spending our precious attention, which is giving us the taste of life that we're having in the moment. It's conditioning our experience. Speaker 4 (6:52) in ways that are unnecessary suffering. So my recommendation is really understand the value of your attention. Speaker 4 (7:10) You don't need to squander it. You don't need to get into this addictive habit of having to be constantly and quickly entertained. It's probably healthier for us to go the other direction a lot, to really slow it down, to notice when you're getting impatient, when something's not going fast enough. Notice that. And enjoy things that are slow. Deliberately find something that's going to just slow you down. Speaker 4 (7:48) And enjoy the process. Just enjoy it. Challenge yourself if you're feeling that you're not being entertained quickly enough. Like what we used to call boredom, which seems that hardly anyone knows what that is anymore. But it's often a source of your genius. Something has a chance to flow through. Some insight gets to bubble to the surface. You know, in retreats, we go very slow. We're quiet. We're not rushing around. We're not forced to be walking slowly. If you want to walk fast, you can walk fast. But there's not a lot of external entertainment. And yet, we become so enchanted by just the simplest things. I was playing some music last night on Spotify, Speaker 5 (8:50) listening Speaker 4 (8:51) to some old songs. Speaker 4 (8:55) And I was reflecting on how sometimes in retreats, I'll play a piece of music at the end of a retreat day. And the way that the music just, it's as if you've never heard music before. It's like you can't believe how rich it is. Speaker 4 (9:11) how it just goes through your whole being. And in this case, with playing music from another time, from another era, I was just really enjoying, like it took me back, and I was just enjoying. Speaker 4 (9:28) you know, memories were floating up or just feelings from that time were floating up. And I said to myself, oh, this is a good way to spend my attention this evening. This is good. So I'm just encouraging you, whatever in your life that is. Speaker 4 (9:48) enjoyable, is out of the maelstrom of speed and getting more and figuring, you know. Like another thing I've noticed is, because now we're entering into this age of the dominance of AI, the expectation to keep up with all of this complicated technology, we might have a feeling, a sense that we are falling behind. We can't do it. Speaker 4 (10:19) And so then there's this thing hanging on us. Even if you're roaring along and staying on your devices a lot and figuring things out, even then you have this background sense that you just can't keep up. You're not going to be able to keep up. Speaker 4 (10:35) Well, what if we challenge that assumption as well? And maybe it's true, we're not going to keep up with the ever-changing, ever more complicated technology. But what if we can truly just use our attention wisely for as long as we can? Speaker 4 (11:03) We can still choose going slow. We can make that choice. And what I mean by going slow, I just mean taking time with things, letting it elongate. Yesterday, out of the blue, I baked some... peanut butter cookies because I found this three ingredient recipe and I happen to have the three ingredients so I thought okay I'll try it. It was just strangely enjoyable you know I kind of just did this spontaneous