The Importance of Awareness

“And yet I think also that if even we today could acquire the knack of maintaining undistracted consciousness between coffee breaks, we too might find that we possessed angelic talents, powers, and skills.” – Joseph Campbell

“The truth about us is sobering: We have been playing with our smartphones while hurtling toward the abyss…” – Sam Harris, Trump in Exile

The Decline of Attention

Human flourishing depends on many mental and physical attributes: dexterous hands, abstract thought, language, and social bonds. If any of these vanished on a large scale, our quality of life would decline. Most of these foundations of human achievement remain intact—but one mental faculty essential to progress is in alarming decline.

Every worthwhile endeavor depends on the ability to focus attention. Throughout history, humanity has lifted itself from hardship by sustaining attention on long pursuits: developing technologies, improving social organization, and expanding the possibilities for individual fulfillment. Modern life offers more comfort, safety, and choice than ever before.[1] Yet these very improvements have eased the pressures that once demanded focus—hunting for food, making clothes, navigating cities—while granting us endless opportunities for distraction.

Our attention spans have become casualties of modern life. Without the ability to focus, we cannot direct our mental and physical gifts toward pursuits that bring lasting fulfillment. When we repeatedly succumb to distraction, much of life’s meaning contracts into trivial diversions. And when most people can no longer aim their minds toward higher goals, society falters—because fleeting impulses, rather than deliberate engagement, begin to rule our thoughts and behavior.

Western civilisation is praised for empowering the individual, yet without the ability to focus, we lose autonomy by continually yielding to shallow stimulation. The neglect of attention is among modern society’s greatest failings, and one for which we must each take responsibility if we wish to use our minds and bodies freely.

Awareness and Attention

Before moving on, let’s clarify the difference between attention and awareness. Attention is the ability to focus on something, but it doesn’t necessarily include awareness: the conscious knowing of what is being focused on. For instance, while driving I may pay enough attention to arrive safely even as my mind drifts to a conversation from earlier in the day. Without awareness, however, I won’t actually know that I’m driving or thinking. Awareness allows us to recognise the objects that occupy attention.

Attention holds objects in mind—sights, thoughts, intentions, and so on—but its movement is usually governed by ingrained mental habits or by events in the outside world. (These mental habits, arising involuntarily, can themselves be seen as part of the context of our lives—rather than something we do.) By revealing what occupies attention, awareness allows us to change how we use it from moment to moment.

To focus, we must interrupt the mind’s tendency to cascade through associations. Awareness can steady a wandering mind, allowing us to remain with fewer objects of attention. This is a crucial life skill. Our attention is continually pulled and churned by stimuli—beneficial, neutral, or harmful—and unless we notice how it is being used, we cannot choose to use it differently.[2]

We live in a world where happiness is often secondary to the economic and social pressures that mould our behaviour—so unless we tend to our minds with awareness, we become insecure consumers rather than fulfilled beings.

As Ernest Becker observed in The Denial of Death, “Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget.” Today, social media and endless streaming services continue that same project of distraction, lulling us out of full consciousness and dulling our potential.

Changing Habit through Awareness

Most of us know that we could improve life by improving our habits, yet their stubborn nature keeps us mired in familiar routines. Change cannot be forced by merely punctuating those habit patterns with the thought, “Life could be better,” or “I really hate this.” To improve our lives, we must refine how we use attention—because how we use attention is, ultimately, how we experience life. Awareness allows us to direct attention in new ways, shaping better habits.[3] In this sense, training attention is the most reliable path to robust contentment.

Over the course of a day, most changes in behaviour are driven either by strong external catalysts (for example, a 9 a.m. start to work) or by impulses we never consciously chose (such as compulsive phone checking). Our attention and behaviour are carried along by forces that seldom arise from genuine insight into how to flourish. Habits and compulsions interact with external stimuli to propel us through life, yet for most people the resulting mental states rarely satisfy.

Without awareness, we lack the means to understand how we suffer and how we thrive. We can analyse ourselves through thought, but self-reflection—often biased and retrospective—cannot replace the direct, wordless knowing that awareness provides. Without this immediate insight into moment-to-moment experience, how can we hope to refine it for the better?

The benefits of cultivated awareness may not be obvious, because our culture has struggled to turn awareness inward for personal understanding. Yet we have masterfully applied that same awareness to understand the external world.

Forces we fail to notice can exert great power over us—whether they take the form of natural disasters, infections before germ theory, neurological disorders before neuroscience, or, as this essay emphasises, our own habitual patterns of thought. To shape the external world to our advantage, we must first understand its workings; casual observation is never enough. (For this reason, the frivolous way we consume information online is something of a travesty.)

Likewise, changing our own patterns of behaviour requires an intimate awareness of our inner states. Allowing attention to be passively herded along can never lead to a fulfilling life. When we lack awareness—of either the world or our minds—we lose the ability to change them skilfully.

That said, while the responsibility to be aware rests with us, we need not blame ourselves for lapses of attention or awareness.[4]

Awareness as Witness and Editor

We are not ultimately responsible for what arises in the mind, because awareness itself is the means by which change becomes possible. Awareness cannot summon something before it appears in consciousness; that would contradict the causal nature of the universe. Awareness is witness, not author. 

In any moment, our minds could not be otherwise—because they are part of the causal flow of reality, which unfolds only one way at a time. Just as the clutter on my desk could not be different right now, neither could my mind. What awareness can do is reveal mental events as they arise, before they shape subsequent behaviour, allowing us to choose how to respond.[5]

In this sense, awareness functions as an internal editor. It does not create mental phenomena but reviews them as they appear, offering the chance to revise our responses. We may not control what enters awareness, but through awareness we gain a limited veto—an ability to redirect habitual reactions. (Likewise, we do not control when awareness arises—yet certain practices, such as meditation, increase its likelihood.)

When we judge ourselves for what occupies attention, we do so before awareness has had the chance to bring change. Such judgments pull us away from awareness by distracting us with deluded ideas about where our faults lie. Our faults can never be reduced to a single thought—the universe is more complex than that, and we are not ultimately the authors of our actions. 

Direct, experiential insight gained through awareness can carry us beyond patterns of thought and behaviour born from the illusion that we are separate from the world.

Seeing Through the Self

By closely observing our own experience, we can begin to dismantle the sense of self—and few skills are more valuable. At any moment, part of our attention is unconsciously engaged in constructing an identity and positioning it against what we perceive as an external world. We can spend a lifetime unaware that this ongoing mental effort sustains the very self that seems to suffer from anxiety. Cultivating enough awareness to momentarily pierce the illusion of self offers real relief from the tension that comes from identifying with mental events.

For example, when walking down the street, my gait sometimes changes as someone approaches. I might take this as proof that I’m awkward—but did I choose this response? Does it happen every time? Of course not. And if I didn’t choose it, and it isn’t constant, why should I identify with it? Isn’t it simply a conditioned reaction? With sufficient awareness, I can observe the awkwardness as something that arises on its own and let go of the urge to judge it. Instead of reinforcing the idea of a neurotic self, I can attend to the subtle mental movement beneath it. Directing awareness into such unexamined areas opens the possibility of existing differently.

By offering a real-time view of how we construct and position a self in the world, awareness allows a degree of emotional distance from our mental lives. When you’re watching the self, you’re less consumed by being it. In moments of emotional intensity, older regions of the brain can override the reflective capacities of the prefrontal cortex, leaving us reactive rather than responsive. Awareness steadies this process, allowing us to step back from the ongoing drama of the self.

Awareness reveals that thoughts and emotions arise in consciousness just as sights, sounds, tastes, and sensations do. Everything—including our mental lives and behaviour—simply happens, as everything has always happened throughout cosmic history, without a tinkerer behind the scenes. Yet it’s easy to overlook this. With steady awareness, we see that the thought “I am aware” is backward, for awareness already contains everything that the “I” is made of.[6]

For those who cannot imagine experience unbounded by self, an analogy may help to illustrate how awareness dismantles the structures behind our mental illusions.

Many of us have noticed that when we picture a friend or relative’s face, concentrating on the image makes it vanish. In such moments, attention is spread across subtle impressions—thoughts, emotions, and sensations—that together create the feeling of that person. This feeling gives the illusion that a clear mental image exists. When awareness focuses on the face, it doesn’t dissolve a picture that was there; it reveals that no fixed image ever formed.

The same is true of our inner lives: sustained awareness slows the emotional undercurrents and associations that convince us we are solid, separate selves with definite boundaries. A local self has never truly existed—only thoughts and feelings that make it seem so. Much of awareness’s power lies in its ability to interrupt these automatic associations.

Beyond Thinking

People often believe they are aware for most of the day, yet they lack the awareness to recognise just how unaware they are. When a friend of mine began meditating, one of the first things he told me was how astonishing it was to notice how often he became lost in thought—something he had never realised before. He had assumed he was moving through life fully aware of what was happening, but his lack of awareness had concealed that very fact.

Just as the ignorant tend to overestimate their own knowledge, the unaware tend to overestimate their capacity to remain aware. The thinking mind, with its near-limitless potential for self-deception, can obscure awareness indefinitely.

When we are most captivated by thinking, we are usually least aware. Awareness must be experienced to be known, yet words can still gesture toward it. Consider the sentence, “I don’t know whether the weather will be nice today.” We instantly know which whether refers to choice and which weather to climate, without needing to analyse the sentence. We don’t consciously reason this out; a subtler intelligence handles it effortlessly. Awareness functions at a similar level of mind.

From this vantage point, we can see through even the stealthiest thoughts, which, when unnoticed, masquerade as reality. As awareness deepens, our perception of the external world—constructed entirely by the nervous system—begins to shift. Lucid dreaming demonstrates how much awareness can alter perception.

When we are unaware that we are dreaming, the creations of the dream completely absorb us. Yet in the instant we recognise we are dreaming, the dream’s solidity weakens, and we gain a measure of control over its unfolding. Bringing awareness to dreams reveals that we inhabit mental representations, not something external to ourselves.

Dreams arise from the same brain that generates waking life. In wakefulness, strong awareness can evoke a similar lucid quality, in which every phenomenon—no matter how distant—is known as an appearance within awareness itself. By loosening our mental associations and isolating aspects of experience more precisely, we come to see reality, and our place within it, more clearly. Seeing clearly, it becomes evident that the path to a satisfying life is to live skilfully—to favour what is deeply rewarding over what is merely pleasurable.

Focus and Fulfilment

All enduring sources of satisfaction arise from the development of skill.[7] In cultivating skill, we experience the fulfilment of pursuing a goal, the reward of social recognition, and—unless the skill serves merely bureaucratic ends—the intrinsic pleasure of the activity itself. Building skill demands awareness: the ability to resist distraction and postpone short-term pleasure for longer-term growth. Contrary to what many assume, focusing awareness on a single task is not a burden but a profound source of joy.

Discipline is often praised as a virtue, yet we are rarely taught how to practise it competently. We repeatedly thrash our minds against tasks that demand concentration, only to fail, grow disheartened, crave distraction, and abandon the effort altogether. But discipline, at its core, is simply the ability to sustain attention. To build skill, we must focus on a set of variables that can be manipulated in increasingly complex ways, creating a continuous source of reward and meaning.

Every great artist, scientist, or athlete has mastered their craft through nothing more—at least at the level of conscious experience—than the capacity to remain focused and resist distraction. Granted, some outliers with unfortunate neurochemistry or neurophysiology live in despair despite exceptional powers of attention.[8] Yet even for these few, focusing on the process of mastery can ease much of the suffering that comes from a restless, scattered mind.

A lack of focus leaves us vulnerable to drifting along unconscious chains of thought. Our minds are shaped by millions of years of evolution and, more recently, by a self-obsessed consumer culture. In earlier times, constant satisfaction would have been maladaptive—complacent creatures seldom survived. Natural selection thus favoured a baseline of dissatisfaction, a bias toward seeking improvement. Combined with modern conditioning, these same tendencies now lead us to judge the present moment—and ourselves within it—as inadequate. As a result, we live in near-constant pursuit of different conditions.

As long as the mind wanders unchecked, lasting satisfaction will remain elusive, for the grass will always seem greener somewhere else. Contentment in the present depends on focusing attention on what is happening now, rather than yearning toward a perpetually unrealised future. Yet our relationship with technology increasingly depletes awareness, fuels the dissatisfaction born of restless minds, and separates us from direct, lived experience.

Technology and Distraction

Technology offers fleeting bursts of pleasure that require no real investment, breeding a kind of mental laziness. True fortitude arises from the ability to stay composed amid distraction and discomfort—to remain steady during a task with equanimity. Without awareness, such steadiness is impossible.

In the past, even small pleasures demanded effort: we had to meet friends in person, make a phone call, or sit through television commercials and remember to switch back when they ended. Now an emoji can replace a sentence, endless scrolling can fill any idle moment, and entire meals can be ordered with a tap of the thumb. These habits fracture attention and dull emotional life, leaving us less engaged and less balanced.

The Internet grants nearly unlimited access to information—the very future science fiction once imagined. Yet now that we’ve achieved it, most of what we do online is stare into an endless feed of novelty, mistaking motion for meaning. Away from our computers, phones keep us from direct experience, pulling us into endless exchanges over trivialities. Constantly yielding to social impulse is the enemy of awareness. Tweeting about living in the moment only guarantees that a moment has just been missed. As social animals, we are easily trapped by thoughts of others and how we appear to them. We cannot know ease while our minds are preoccupied with what others are doing or how best to display our own lives.

Technology has trained our minds to seek constant, shallow stimulation. Even in the rare moments we are offline, our thoughts continue to wander, leaving us anxious or bored. Boredom and anxiety arise from this restlessness, for without thoughts wishing things were otherwise, we would be largely at ease. As anyone who has practised meditation or yoga knows, genuine concentration emerges from a relaxed mind. Yet many fail to see that our digital habits and fractured attention make it difficult to feel settled in life. Paradoxically, the age of perpetual connection has left us most disconnected when it matters most.

Conversations and Awareness

Our ability to disagree civilly has deteriorated. Many now spend hours online consuming material that confirms what they already believe, while algorithms ensure that opposing views rarely intrude. Social media amplifies this isolation by linking us with like-minded others, creating echo chambers that harden conviction and narrow empathy. As a result, more people than ever regard their opinions as self-evident truths. Coupled with technology’s erosion of attention, this leaves us increasingly unable to listen—or to have meaningful conversations at all.

Awareness is essential for listening to unfamiliar viewpoints and recognising our own biases when considering a change of mind. Disagreement has always been part of human life. In earlier eras, those who voiced heretical ideas were exiled or killed; over time, however, we matured enough to judge such ideas on their merits rather than on how they made us feel. The willingness to examine once-unpalatable views is what enabled the progress of the modern world. Today, many have lost that capacity.

Lacking awareness, we react to difference with emotion rather than curiosity. Yet we live in a world more complex and fast-changing than ever before, and the likelihood that any person’s worldview is entirely correct approaches zero. Constructive disagreement keeps us aligned with reality—but it requires awareness and sustained attention.

Constructive disagreement begins with truly listening—isolating where perspectives diverge. It then requires an imaginative act: temporarily adopting the other person’s assumptions and seeing how their worldview fits, or conflicts, with our own. If we can hold this alternative view without recoiling in anger or defensiveness, we gain the chance to integrate whatever truth it contains. Without awareness, such open exchange is impossible. Awareness allows conversation to fulfil its highest purpose: bridging divides, softening polarisation, and keeping society from fracturing beyond repair.

Cultivating Awareness

The erosion of awareness marks a decline in our capacity for happiness—both as individuals and as a species. Consciousness is the aperture through which experience enters, and awareness offers the surest means of adjusting its focus. It is therefore vital, for both society and the individual, that we learn to cultivate and protect this faculty.

Countless minds—and immeasurable well-being—have been lost to the cruelties of slavery, exploitation, and poverty. Yet in a quieter way, the modern world has also diminished us through the impoverishment of attention. Methods to counter this decline already exist, but first we must recognise awareness as a resource worth cherishing. To value it is to remain humble before the vastness of reality, to admit uncertainty, and to use our mental gifts for the good of life itself. Without awareness, there can be no progress.

[1]Without intending to be ethnocentric, my use of “modern life” unfortunately excludes large portions of the world.

[2] Keep in mind that although a change in external conditions may initiate more happiness, we generally bring our entrenched habits of thought and behaviour—which are the most intimate cause of our suffering and happiness—wherever we go.

[3] E.g., If the clichéd man wins the lottery but is habitually dissatisfied with his moment-to-moment experience, then a shift in his relation to objects that occupy his attention will produce happiness more reliably than money (which is just a way of achieving more objects of attention, assuming his needs are met).

[4] Unless blame is an incentive to beneficial change, in which case, self-flagellate away.

[5] And how we respond, of course, influences what comes into awareness in the future.

[6] This includes the most common symptom of being a self, which is the feeling of being located behind your eyes. Vision plays a large role in making us feel this way. I’m hopeful that some VR meditative programs will come out to shift our sense of self by manipulating vision.

[7] This includes steady relationships, which take skill to maintain.

[8] David Foster Wallace comes to mind as an unfortunate example.