https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/06/adam-phillips-interview-attention-seeking

 

Extract

You suggest that attention might be a form of madness or addiction. Why?
There’s a part of us that wants to attack our own development and the way we do this is by actively narrowing our mind. And that is what a phobia or an addiction is: it’s the overorganising of attention, because it solves a lot of problems in a certain sense.

So the reason we might want to narrow our attention is for fear of the unknown consequences of its promiscuity: we really don’t know where it will take us. And that’s exciting and exhilarating, but it’s also troubling.

Attention-seekers generally have a bad reputation, but you say that “attention-seeking is one of the best things we can do”. Why?
Because we need attention and we don’t usually know what it is in ourselves that we want attending to, but we know we want something from other people. And this is why celebrity culture is interesting. Because it appears that there’s a whole swath of people who know what they want: it could be called fame, it could be called wealth. But I think it’s much more enigmatic than it looks. Because the risk is you get a huge amount of attention and no engagement.