The Attention Itch

We all experience the same need to be heard--but do we actually know what we want?

Very occasionally I get an itch somewhere, usually in my leg or my arm but sometimes worst of all it feels like it’s somewhere inside my head. And the infuriating thing about it is that I can’t quite pinpoint exactly what spot on my body is itching. Whatever part of my brain is registering this disturbance just isn’t mapping it correctly onto my body. It’s like when the little dot on Google Maps gets confused and your phone can’t quite nail down where you are or which direction you’re moving.

So I try to scratch near where I think this itch is, but it’s never quite right. It’s always actually a little to the left, a little to the right, up, down, across from where I’m scratching. Intuitively I know exactly what this sensation is and how to fix it, but to get to its origin I have to move in some non-Euclidean direction, like East of the North Pole.

Scratching doesn’t do anything but it feels like it should. So that’s what you do.

And before you say it, I’m not talking about the invisible bugs under your skin. That’s something else and you should definitely speak to someone about that.

I can’t help think that a lot of our anxiety and feelings of disconnect and isolation stem from something like this phenomenon except it’s lodged in whatever lobe of our brain is responsible for handling those sensations. We are social animals, there is a true need hardwired in us to feel that we have made true connections. Even indirect connections through a conduit or a proxy, we need to know that our conscious existence has been detected and logged, and the need goes both ways.

Incidentally, I think this is why AI novels and shows will never truly take off. These things don’t address the core point of artistic entertainment, which is the psychic connection, via a medium, between you and a storyteller. It’s the sharing of an experience of qualia. An AI generated movie would just be objects moving on a screen. Even my cats aren’t tricked by that.

If I can’t eat it then its existence is irrelevant to me.

I’ve heard social media compared to a Skinner box, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Skinner boxes actually provide the stimulus that the subject is seeking. To me a much better analogy is this phantom itch. We think that the attention—the scratching—is going to get us to the bottom of this infernal unrest that we’re feeling. But it doesn't hit the mark, it never does, it just orbits around the general area of it.

Last week I wrote an article I was fairly happy with but the engagement stats that come with my publishing platform tell me that it bombed. There’s no way of knowing exactly what it was, just that a much higher than normal number of those who clicked on it didn’t get very far into it. I made a post on Substack Notes about that fact—truthfully, not to complain to my readers about it. A couple of up-and-at-em replies about writing what I feel like and damn the haters made me look inward a little—why did I write that note? To apologise? It felt a bit like times I had sheepishly apologised to my editor about an article that, in retrospect, wasn’t great and he’d noticed it wasn’t great. There was an element, I think, of damage control. The line stopped going up. The line has to keep going up!

Wherever I can, I try to be honest with myself about myself because I think a lot of the missteps we make in life stem from a kind of self-deception. Why feel downhearted if the line doesn’t keep going up every week? Why do I need everything I write to really land with people? Part of this project is establishing an audience and a reputation so that one day I might be able to sell books to people. I enjoy writing, mostly I think, because of the connection that it establishes with other people. I’m about to turn 40 and if I threw a birthday party I could probably count on one hand the number who would show up—three of them live with me (I’m counting the cats). I’m a man scrambling for purchase in an economy of eyeballs.

But can this itch actually be scratched in this way or will it remain ever elusive? I’m cautious and skeptical particularly when I think, as I do far too often, of Elon Musk.

The man has 175 million Twitter followers. He can post anything about anything—a meme, a rant about how great white people are, a single exclamation point, and within seconds he has hundreds of people in his replies telling him how much they love him. How he is saving western civilization. Rocket ship emojis. Quotes that he said. Response after response after response .Pages of it. People who didn’t even read what he said but want him to know that their life would be worthless if he ever stopped tweeting. They tweet photos of himself at him. They tweet photos of his own son at him. They tweet photos of himself as a child at him. Many of them are bots programmed to just tweet praise at him, but many of them seem convinced that he reads every reply and they carry on like they’re having a casual conversation as equals.

Liked or loathed, he is one of the most famous human beings on the planet, if not the most famous. And that’s exactly his problem. He’s hit an upper limit on how famous it’s actually possible to be, but that means the line stops going up. Notoriously, during last year’s Super Bowl, he was so upset that his tweets were getting fewer impressions than the President of the United States that he threatened his staff if they didn’t change the algorithm to prioritise his tweets over everyone else’s, including the Leader of the Free World.

It's an extreme example, but a clear one, of someone going completely nuts in desperation to find that itch and scratch it. He’s invented an immersion chamber to bask twenty-four hours a day in nothing but pathological adoration. It hasn’t made him a happier person.

But he still thinks, eventually, it will. And not the Twitter thing alone. I’m utterly convinced that his never-ending single minded quest to control every institution and bring down the entire media and engineer society to adopt his ideal system of art deco racial caste space feudalism has its roots in a very deeply entrenched need to secure himself in the universe both during his life and permanently after his death. He knows that even a great industrialist might be forgotten over eons, but you will have life everlasting if you shape humanity’s ideology, break it free from Earth, and give birth to God.

Because being forgotten is the true death. Once the last person who ever thinks of you thinks of you for the last time, that’s it. You’re erased. The fear of that happening and securing the certainty that it won’t is what drives him. He’ll never have that security because chasing it is the same as chasing the phantom itch.

I think a lot of us fear the finality of that eventual erasure, I think a lot of us fear it more than death. I know I do. Elon Musk’s immense wealth means he’s able to do a lot more damage seeking it.

You can tell a lot about somebody by their social media habits, I think. Donald Trump is another absolutely compulsive tweeter who seems to be following the same trajectory as Musk. Trump, also, is driven by an insatiable quest for fame. He doesn’t seem to have any particular motive for being president beyond the immense fame that comes with that role. I’ve always said that the Trump Border Wall isn’t actually a wall at all—it’s a pyramid.

Trump has run into the exact same problem as Musk, though. He’s become the most powerful person and discovered that it didn’t scratch that itch. So instead of any kind of introspection he just starts thinking about how to go further. But what can he do? You can’t go higher than President.

Not in a democracy, anyway. Oh, you see the danger here, then.

In the bucket of social media all you see are millions of crabs scrambling over each other for the sake of that unscratchable phantom itch. It’s a mire of grind and resentment. I resent them too in turn because so many people who get more attention than me to outrageous orders of magnitude are people utterly devoid of any talent, skill, or insight. And that’s a very mean thing to say but it’s also something feel completely comfortable saying about Catturd.

And that’s someone who will still complain endlessly about the lack of attention he’s getting. Catturd has never said anything in his entire life that your racist uncle doesn’t say every afternoon, but he’s still gifted with immense celebrity and nevertheless still living under an immense amount of stress over his lack of attention and fame. He’s a former army grunt who played in a pub band. He talks to former presidents and the richest and most powerful men in the world, but not as often as he would like to. His last tweet only got 20 million impressions. He's fucking miserable.

But there’s something else also. There’s evidence that the itch can actually be scratched and it doesn’t necessarily self-perpetuate into some kind of doom spiral. Some people do find a way. While I was thinking about all this I also thought about a good piece I read last week by the culture writer

BDM

about Miley Cyrus and how she isn’t an even bigger star than she is. And the answer seems to be that she’s exactly as big a star as she wants or needs to be.

If superstardom is a product of luck, it’s still, also, a product of choices. Those choices are what let you take advantage of luck if it comes your way. Taylor Swift has always wanted to be a superstar. The kind of fanbase she has, the kind of sales she commands, are ultimately the result of her own strategic decisions. So if you want to know why Miley isn’t touring like Taylor, isn’t posting sales numbers like Taylor, or whatever, I think on some level the actual answer is that she doesn’t really want it. She doesn’t want the life that goes with it. She has been the center of the cultural conversation, back in the Bangerz era, and I would guess she didn’t really enjoy the experience.

why isn't it miley's era? BDM

This is of course not a perfect example because Miley Cyrus was born famous. Her father is Billy Ray Cyrus and her grandfather was a congressman, so she’s a member of the third-consecutive-generation-with-a-Wikipedia-page club. Her relationship to fame is radically different from the outset to someone like me or, for that matter, Catturd. But the born-famous and the from-scratch nobodies are just as susceptible to the phantom itch. It seems to be just a part of us, largely dependent of our birth circumstances.

So what makes Miley so special?

To hear her say it, the difference between her and her father, in terms of how they were brought up into fame, is that she’s always felt like a star. Which either answers everything or answers nothing. But as unhelpful as it may seem with how intuitive it is, I think mindfulness is just a big part of it. And that the solution to living with an attention itch in a world that can seem isolating in its vastness is to treat each other a little bit like stars. Maybe that adds up. Maybe if we can save each other some of that anxiety then the itch, if not scratched, might still fade a little.

So I’ll resolve to care less when the work doesn’t cause a splash and to take it less for granted when it does. To care less when the line doesn’t go up and to care more about you, right now, those of you who think I have something useful to say and have jumped on at the ground floor of what I’m hoping will be a satisfying career no matter the amount of attention it brings.

I’d still like you to share, though, because I do like to scratch around the edges of that itch, you know. As a famous sailor once said, I yam what I yam. If you stick with me, I’ll try to give you some attention too.