Reading your way out of the Attention Economy

I recently became aware of my mortality.

That may sound ridiculous but hear me out. To some degree everyone is aware that they’ll die. But for most of my life (I’m coming up on 28 years old) it was just a fact that sat in the background of my mind, not something that affected my life.

That changed last year when my grandfather took ill. When that news landed I realized that, just like this person I’ve admired my whole life will pass, so will I.

Now, I’m more aware of my time. Not the day-to-day time, but my lifetime. This awareness affects just about everything I do. I find myself often wondering how I can be confident that the way I spend my days - the things, topics, and people I choose to put time and attention into - are the things I’ll be proud of and grateful for when it’s my time. This care I take spans the big things, like my career and my relationships, all the way down to the seemingly small.

This Christmas break, mortality changed the way I asked “what books should I read next year?”

Or maybe it’s better said that it got me to ask the question at all.

Now, the topic I’m most interested in is the effects of doomscrolling, the attention economy, and more broadly, Digital Ethics. This, I consider to be a question I will be proud to explore and grateful for having explored when my time comes. I think it’s the way I can be of greatest service to others. Naturally, my reading is toward this question. Still, that’s a broad space and a near infinite number of books to choose from.

So, how do I choose what to read this year? What kinds of books are useful for this topic? How do I want my books to change me?

I started with Aristotle.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is sort of a handbook on how to live well - to flourish as a human being. In it, he presents a divide in the soul or mind if you prefer. There’s the rational component, and the non-rational. Each of these drives our behaviour in distinct ways. And, for Aristotle, each of these has a sort of optimal state - the state of virtue.

Aristotle argues that to live well, we ought to cultivate through practice, virtues of the rational and non-rational components of the soul.

The rational component is the part we’re most well acquainted with. That’s where our intuitive notion of the self lives. That part of us where inner narration or visualization lives. The thing that consciously makes decisions. That thing that feels most like who we are.

For the rational part of the soul, we can cultivate Virtues of Thought primarily through study. Essentially, acquiring enough knowledge and developing the understanding and skill to use that knowledge to help you make good conscious decisions.

The less intuitive component, at least to me, is the non-rational part. This is where appetite, urges, feelings, and our modern understanding of desires live. It’s that part of you that urges you to eat the cake, that part that makes it feel like you didn’t mean to doomscroll but it “just happened without thinking.”

For this part, we can cultivate Virtues of Character through habituation. Aristotle argues that through practice, we can actually learn to enjoy things that are good for us more and enjoy things that are bad for us less.

At first this felt foreign to me. I think many modern readers think what we like and dislike is fixed at the trait level. But the more I thought about it, the more Aristotle seemed to me, to be totally right. Our desires are malleable.

Take, for example, the person who wants to become a runner. Their first run sucks! It’s painful; it feels boring, arduous, frustrating. And the next day is even worse with all the soreness. But what about the experienced runner? They love running. They crave it. If they haven’t gone on a run in a few days they get antsy. When they feel lethargic or tired, their mind-body seems to prompt them to run.

Are experienced runners just born to love running, while the rest of us are born couch potatoes? I really doubt that.

I started running two years ago. I hated it. These days, though I’m not running any marathons, I at least somewhat enjoy going for a little jog here and there. When I’m bored, been writing for too long, or haven’t moved in a while, I feel an itch to do something - to move. That wasn’t there before. And even if it’s only a 30 minute jog on the treadmill, I’m closer than I was before.

I’ve learned, at least a little, to enjoy running - to enjoy what’s good for me.

Which is to say - in more Aristotelian terms - the non-rational part of my soul is in greater alignment with the rational part of my soul. Maybe, I’ve developed some Virtue of Character.

It’s of course more complex than this, but you’ll forgive me for not making this a full summary of the Nicomachean ethics … a task I’m ill-suited to anyway. Go read Jared Henderson for a real philosopher’s take (seriously, he’s awesome!)

Fair question.

This year, my core reading (what makes up this list) is all toward cultivating Virtue, particularly with respect to the digital. Basically, I want to feel less pulled by digital media consumption, and more pulled by deep learning, love and friendship, and my health. I also want to understand how this pull toward digital media consumption works and how it’s being fostered against our wills; what exactly is the attention economy and how does it work?

To this end, I’ve split my reading into two streams.

The first stream has ~10 books on techno-journalism/criticism about the attention economy and surveillance capitalism, as well as some foundational cognitive science and psychology to understand the attention economy’s tricks better. Books like Nudge, Enshittification, Hooked, Addiction By Design, and Surveillance Capitalism.

This first stream is what I think will develop Virtues of Thought with respect to our Digital Ethics. By studying the attention economy and the psychology that underlies it, I think I’ll be better equipped to separate the good from the bad in our digital environments. To make rational decisions.

But that leaves a big question: How do we cultivate Virtues of Character with respect to Digital Ethics?

I think that the Virtues of Character play a much larger role in the battle for our attention than the Virtues of Thought. Intuitively, I think we are all coming to the conclusion that doomscrolling too much is not good for our wellbeing. There’s more nuance to develop in our understanding - in the rational component of the mind - but we have the gist.

How though, like the novice runner who wants to learn to love running and abhor sedentariness, do we learn to love healthier activities and hate doomscrolling? Is that even possible?

The second stream is full of classic literature, philosophy, and epic poetry. For this year, it’s driven by the Western Canon (but in the future I’m excited to explore Eastern traditions as well). This stream is comprised of books like: Plato’s Republic, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Augustine’s confessions, Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

And now, if you’re like me, you’re wondering how does that help you develop Virtues of Character?

To answer that question, or at least gain some purchase on something shaped like an answer, we’re going to explore some modern cognitive science I picked up from Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke’s lecture series: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and After Socrates.

Aristotle tells us what we need to cultivate. Vervaeke (and the scholars he cites) helps explain how reading can cultivate it.

The type of knowing we’re most familiar with these days, what most people would call “knowledge”, is called propositional knowing. This is “knowing that” or knowing a fact. It’s the kind of thing I can glean from the first reading stream.

Now, you may be somewhat hesitant to call anything other than these kinds of facts or propositions ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing’ at first, but the rest, I promise, are intuitive and clearly distinct from propositional knowing, if you allow just a touch of openness to the idea.

Next, is procedural knowing. This is “knowing how”.

Skills, crafts, arts, these are all knowing how - procedural knowings. And they’re distinct from propositional knowing. Let’s take a specific procedural knowing as an example: playing guitar.

First off, it’s clearly, at least colloquially, a form of knowing. We say “I know how to play guitar.” But, I couldn’t give you a set of facts that makes you able to play guitar, could I? I couldn’t talk you through it, neither of us having a guitar in hand. If I said a G chord requires that you put your fingers, here, here, and here, in some sense you’d know what a G chord is but until you’ve played the G Chord yourself, you don’t know how a G chord is played - you don’t have the skill, the procedural knowledge.

In some sense, procedural knowledge isn’t just in the brain, it’s in the body too. Our body has knowledge - something like muscle memory.

This goes deeper still.

Perspectival Knowing is “knowing what it’s like to be” something or some way.

We all have our own perspective. And what our perspective really is, is knowing what it’s like to be us. What our thoughts and feelings are like, how we respond to different situations.

Perspectival knowing is key to empathy, for example. I’d argue, the key skill of empathy is attempting to take on the perspectives of others. In doing so, we can learn about our loved ones, for example, and better serve and accept them. We can come to understand why they do the things they do. I would also argue that the more we practice empathizing through perspective taking, the more we develop our perspectival knowing.

Perspectival knowing is still clearly knowing of some kind. We say “I know what it’s like to be …” But, it’s clearly distinct from propositional knowing. I couldn’t possibly list you enough facts to make it so you understand what it’s like to be me - to know my experience fully. The facts could help you try to take on my perspective, but at the end of the day, you’re going to do a lot of imagining and using your own perspective to try to understand mine. Experience is just too rich to put down into facts.

There’s some really cool philosophy on this topic. For a good place to start try this famous paper: ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ by Nagel

Lastly, Vervaeke points to one more kind of knowing - Participatory knowing.

Participatory knowing is knowing how to switch perspectives in different situations to be best suited to that situation.

I’m not always a single kind of way. I have a perspective, a role, I take on when I’m with my girlfriend, that is totally different from the way I am when I stream on YouTube, for example. With these role-based perspectives, come different sets of actions, feelings, thoughts, ways of reacting and speaking, all relevant to the specific task and role. And thank God for that!

It’d be bizarre if I tried to talk to my YouTube stream audience the way I talk to my girlfriend, wouldn’t it? This subconscious perspectival shift is essential and doing it well helps us be suited to our current context and goals.

This again, is clearly not propositional knowing. How could I tell you all the relevant actions, behaviours, facial expressions to look for, sounds to listen for, to fully define the relationship between my girlfriend and I through a set of facts? Still, knowing what way to be (what perspective to take on) in any situation is a kind of knowing, isn’t it?

So, what do these types of knowing tell us about Virtues of Character? I’d argue a lot.

If Virtues of Thought have to do with propositional knowing (in Aristotle: study, science) and in some cases procedural knowing (in Aristotle: Techne, craft) and we can clearly glean those from the kinds of non-fiction in the first reading stream, what we’re left with is the question of how to cultivate Virtues of Character and what kinds of knowing are related to Virtues of Character.

I argue that Virtues of Character, have mostly to do with perspectival and participatory knowing. More deeply, Virtues of Character simply are the right perspectival and participatory knowing. That what it means to develop virtues of character is to learn what it’s like to be virtuous in various situations, what is the virtuous perspective to take in various situations, and how to take it on.

But, recall, this isn’t propositional knowing. It’s easy to fall into this trap. I’m not saying we ought to simply know “it’s best to be take on the role of a teacher while teaching and that involves lecturing, answering questions, etc.” That’s propositional knowing again, and we can’t collapse perspectival and participatory knowing into the propositional. Instead, we must know how to embody that perspective - how to be that way. Like when we say we know a skill (procedural knowing), like how to play guitar, we don’t mean we know about it, we mean we can do it. Similarly, if we say we know what it’s like to be (perspectival knowing) a good teacher, we don’t mean that we have a list of facts of what one ought to do to teach well, we mean can be a good teacher.

More generally, If we have the perspectival and participatory knowing of a virtuous person, we simply are virtuous of character in the Aristotelian sense. Virtue of Character is these kinds of knowing.

If non-fiction teaches us propositional knowledge and, with practice, procedural knowledge, then what classical literature, philosophy, and epic poetry help us cultivate is perspectival and participatory knowing. Thus, with the right selection of literature, we can cultivate virtues of character.

This may feel like a stretch, especially to those like me who consider themselves recovering philistines. But ask yourself, what is it that we do when we read fiction?

We immerse ourselves in the perspectives of characters as they pass through different settings and contexts. We empathize with them. We learn what it’s like to be them and how they navigate the various roles they play with different people and within different settings. That’s perspectival and participatory knowing.

So, when we read these stories, we learn and internalize various ways of being as well as how various ways of being pan out in different situations. We can develop what we’d normally have to develop by first-hand experience. When we read about virtuous characters we can attempt to internalize their way of being and when we read about non-virtuous characters, we can internalize the Good by contrast.

This pairs nicely with the kind of philosophy that I’ve chosen this year: Confessions, Meditations, and Plato’s Republic.

The first two, though not exactly fiction, still cultivate the same perspectival knowing by putting us in the perspective of Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, and others we may consider to be wise or virtuous.

Plato’s Dialogues are a kind of dialectical philosophy that some scholars argue are designed to cultivate non-propositional knowing - though I won’t get into that here because frankly, I haven’t read that yet.

If I can reach a little, when we read literature and philosophy of this kind, what we learn to do is internalize virtuous ways of being and the more conscious practice of asking “what would <insert favourite sage, virtuous person, etc. here> do?”

The truly Good literature helps us develop within ourselves a compass of virtue.

If this is right, then reading fiction isn’t optional enrichment layered on top of ‘real’ understanding. It’s one of the primary ways we learn how to be a certain kind of person in the world. Hopefully, a better kind of person.

Quick aside: I realize that in the strictest technical sense this isn’t the clean mapping I’m proposing of virtue of character → perspectival and participatory knowing → fiction, philosophy. Prudence, a virtue of thought, according to Aristotle, could very well be learned through fiction as well and could be argued to relate to perspectival and participatory knowing. But, I think the mapping, if squinted at, holds well enough to be useful for guiding us and illustrating the value of fiction.

At the start of this essay, I asked a simple question: what do I want to read this year?

That turned out to be more complicated than I’d hoped. It lead to a deeper question: How do I choose what to read this year? And, with a little Aristotle and cognitive science, I think we’ve got some strong answers.

How do I choose what to read this year? By asking how I want my books to change me. More specifically, what Virtues of Character and Virtues of Thought do I want to cultivate and in what ways?

I’m interested in Digital Ethics which I think relates most pressingly to the Attention and Surveillance Economies. A working definition I’m developing goes something like this:

Digital Ethics: the ongoing cultivation of the kinds of understanding, habits, and desires that allow us to use technology in ways that support human flourishing rather than undermine it.

For cultivating Virtues of Thought, I’ve got a series of non-fiction books that develop my propositional knowledge and understanding of these topics in a rational and analytical way. For my Virtues of Character, I’m exploring philosophy and literature that I think will be transformative. Books that will help me develop my perspective to be broader, healthier, etc.

This list is not about reading more simply for the sake of more, or to be able to say “I’ve read these difficult books.” It’s about reading to become the kind of person who spends their attention, and thus their life, on things they’ll be grateful for, proud of, and that foster well-being.

Thus, there are two streams of books that we can now name the stream of virtuous thought and the stream of virtuous character.

I like that.

Why did I take all that time to make an argument, essentially, for reading fiction? Because I think we, as a society, drastically undervalue reading fiction and these non-propositional forms of knowing. I certainly did for the majority of my life. I wanted to make this case clear to myself as much as to all of you.

I don’t want you simply to read my list, though if you do, cool - we can chat about it! I want to help you choose books for yourself and your own ends.

Your perspective is different from mine and may benefit from other things. For example, you may prefer to start with the Eastern tradition or prefer to read Hindu theologians. Whatever you do though, I hope that you see the tremendous value of fiction, character, and knowledge beyond the facts, for living a good life.

I’ve broken the year into three trimesters (winter, summer, fall)—because, at heart, I’m still an academic. Each trimester has a loose theme, and each stream averages about one book per month (but there are some big ones that take more time).

The list is divided into two parallel streams:

• Character — drawn largely from the Western canon, aimed at cultivating perspective, self-knowledge, and moral imagination.

• Thought — focused on psychology, cognitive science, and the mechanics of the attention economy.

I think these will be mutually reinforcing: understanding how the attention economy works, while also reshaping the person who moves through it.

Foundations: Greeks, Romans, and Cognitive Science

I read Homer, Hesiod, and Sophocles, alongside the Nicomachean Ethics last year otherwise you’d see the Odyssey and the Ethics in here for sure. Instead, I’m picking up from where I left off.

• January — Metamorphoses

• February — The Republic

• March — The Aeneid

• April — Politics

I’ve become increasingly interested in Predictive Processing, a proposed unifying theory of cognition with a lot of affordances for developing new behavioural interventions (among many other rich avenues). I’m hoping it, alongside some classics, will help me better understand what shapes and influences our behaviour and beliefs.

• January — Surfing Uncertainty

• February — Thinking, Fast and Slow

• March — The Extended Mind

• April — Nudge

The Christian Turn & the Psychology of Addiction

This is the most deliberate and challenging part of the year for me.

I grew up a very angry atheist, and reading Christian theology is an intentional decision to challenge my old beliefs. I’m still more or less a non-theist, but I have come to grips with the fact that religions have formed over centuries often with the explicit intent to think deeply about desire, attention, discipline, and meaning. It’d be dishonest for me not to read it.

• May — Confessions

• June — The Divine Comedy: Inferno

• July — Summa Theologiae (selected questions)

• August — The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio

• May— The Shallows

• June — Dopamine Nation

• July — Addiction by Design

• August - Irresistible

This is where the psychology of compulsion meets the engineering of digital environments.

• September and October — The Divine Comedy: Paradiso (finish)

• November and December — Paradise Lost

• September— The Attention Merchants

• October — Weapons of Math Destruction

• November and December — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

This is where individual attention gives way to structural critique.

• The Bible — daily reading (365-day plan)

Again, I’m not looking to be converted. But to read Christian Theology without reading the bible seems wrong.

That’s my list!

I’m sure I’ll deviate and falter and not stick to it perfectly. But, having a list is better than not having a list. At least I know what I want to read.

I’m already a fair chunk of the way through surfing uncertainty and metamorphoses and they are both delightful!

This list is pretty malleable too, so if you’d like to make a suggestion, please feel free to! Many of you are much more well read than I am so I always welcome suggestions and conversation.

Any way, that’s the game plan for 2026. I think it’ll be a fun year!

Cheers,
Nathan Laundry