If you ask people only to pay attention–that is, to obey their super-egos all the time–they will almost inevitably resist. Attention is an imprisoning of the mind. If you don’t put attention to a higher purpose–one associated with absorption–the mind will rebel and so will the heart. In our culture I believe we ask too many people to pay attention too much of the time–and give them back nothing but a salary. If you have to sit on a computer from one end of the day to the other, doing tasks that bore you, you are likely to have a hard time paying attention. Your mind will wander; fantasies roam. Humans cannot live exclusively on the bread and water of attention. The student is sent to the computer, where she must complete one boring task after another with her mind locked in a tiny rectangular space. Her attention will grow deficient, unless you juice her with drugs and lock her inside the mental prison. Later she will take a job that strongly resembles her schools: all attention, no absorption...
Our compulsively productive culture of the super-ego leaves fewer and fewer opportunities for absorption. Under the reign of the computer in its super-ego guise, jobs are more and more about attention: get it right, focus on the details, fill out the chart and revise it. If attention does not lead to absorption, or if there is little possibility for absorption in a given life, then there will be deficits of attention…
It is important to distinguish between being absorbed and being mesmerized. One can be mesmerized, enchanted, visually inebriated: the condition is not hard to bring on. In a super-ego culture that asks us too often to “pay attention,” we can find rest and release through electronic diversion. Paying attention should ideally be rewarded by absorption, but when absorption isn’t available, or no one teaches us how to achieve it, being mesmerized will have to do. Being mesmerized is all about wish-fulfillment. It’s about become the soldier, the knight, the sports star, the princess. It is a turning away from reality. To be absorbed is to intensify one’s connection with what is real, in the hope of reshaping it for the better.
Mark Edmundson, The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World, 78-80.