Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
This past autumn, I made a mediocre vegetable soup. It was obviously worse than what I usually make—less depth of flavor, maybe less flavor at all.
My husband, Ed, and I often joke about the idea that in good food, the secret ingredient is love—so he asked, “Did you put less love into it?”
Well, I was tired, not feeling great, and only trying to ensure we had an easy vegetable in the fridge for the next few days. I had, in fact, put less love into the soup.
And for perhaps the first time, I thought, “Love is attention.”
I’ve been noticing this idea everywhere since then.
I put less attention into something if I’m working from a place of distraction or efficiency-mindedness, not love.
We feel more loved when we receive gifts that are personal, because they required someone to pay special attention to who we are and what we appreciate.
When I spend time writing my Substack letters, and I go over every line a dozen times to make sure it communicates well, that attention is usually from love. (Nobody pays me for these.)
When we seek attention, we seek love.
The idea that “love is attention” brought to mind a quote from one of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother:
“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.”
I think it’s possible to do something poorly despite love, yet I do believe it’s more likely to be done well when love goes into the doing. And I think that’s true whether the love is for the action—baking, cooking, painting—or for the object—the bread or soup or art itself—or for the subject, for the eater of the bread or of the soup, for the viewer of the canvas.
Love creates attention.
I thought this couldn’t be an original idea, so I started an internet search. Sure enough, “love is attention” was suggested before I could finish typing it. Lots of pages popped up. I found quotes (“Attention is the most basic form of love. Through it, we bless and are blessed.” –John Tarrant). I found commentary on the movie Lady Bird (2017), which features this theme. I found lots of personal and professional posts about the topic.
The idea is not new. Somehow, I’d never noticed how strongly love and attention are tied.
I know we feel loved less when a person ignores us. I have heard marriages are much less likely to end when the couple’s habit is to “turn toward” one another when a bid for connection (or attention) is made.
Attention isn’t always love; attention is easily from fear, or pride based in fear.
“What was that noise?” is a form of attention.
Or, “If I don’t get this right, I’ll be fired.” “I have to get the details perfect, because it all depends on me.” “I have to look good for people to like me.”
Hypervigilance is attention held captive, at best a loving desire to protect people twisted into something destructive. It is attention at odds with love.
The attention that lends itself to manipulating people—observing details as a means to selfish ends, at the expense of people—is not love.
And we’ve seen plenty written in recent decades about the problems of distraction. Supposedly, it is our desire to connect meaningfully with people that drives much of social media, yet social media typically takes us away from such connection.
The economist and scholar Herbert A. Simon, who coined the phrase “attention economy” in 1971, long before the internet had a permanent home in our pockets, wrote that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
That is, our attention is precious partly because it is limited. More available information, entertainment, etc. limits it further.
Sometimes our scarce attention is divided across multiple objects of love. You choose to pay attention to your spouse instead of answering the phone when a friend is calling. You listen to a friend instead of paying attention to what you’re baking, even if the baked goods turn out worse. You tell one child “not right now” because the other needs immediate attention.
So attention is not always love, and the absence of attention in one moment is not always from a lack of love.
Yet to choose trivialities over the people in front of us, or to absentmindedly do something just to get it done, to seek shortcuts and half-measures—these surely are an absence of love, in that moment.
The Holy Bible speaks much about fixing our eyes—attention—on God. And what is the “great and first commandment”? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:36-40, ESV; cf. Deut. 6:5)
The idea helps explain Colossians 3:23-24:
“Whatever you do, work at it with your whole being, as for the Lord and not for men, because you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as your reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” (BSB)
I don’t think the motivation to work “heartily” (as in other translations) is solely for the heavenly inheritance, though that jibes with the context of Paul addressing bondservants in particular in those verses.
I believe a major reason to work heartily, with full attention, is out of love for God and an awareness of being loved by Him.
It is a great temptation to take shortcuts in any job, as I did with my mediocre soup. As much as I don’t want to harp on modern AI, ChatGPT and its ilk are shortcuts people reach for often, now. I don’t want to leave them out of the conversation.
I’ve seen a poem by Joseph Fasano making the rounds online, called, “To a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper”. Because it is short, and I risk losing much of the meaning to only quote the lines that are directly relevant, here is the whole poem:
Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it? Love is for the ones who love the work.
I can’t speak for the poet, but to me, the brazen last line doesn’t mean a person is only worth loving if that person loves working. I think it’s merely tying love to attention, in the form of work.
I ran across a blog post by developer and entrepreneur Arvid Kahl, in which he explains his own experience with the ideas in this poem: “Love Is For Those Who Love the Work”, The Bootstrapped Founder, 29 November 2024.
He writes about surrendering some creative problem-solving work in coding to AI tools, and how he was, therefore, avoiding the creative, difficult work he really loved. The work is difficult, but “[t]hat journey of becoming a little more optimal, a little more performant with every iteration—that’s where the love lives,” he writes. “Love for the craft. Love for having developed and honed a skill.”
For him, the love is found in giving his own attention to his creative work.
Maybe this is a different use of “love” than you’re used to. But if “love” doesn’t apply to enjoying a creative task, it certainly applies to relationships with other humans.
Just over a year ago, in my December 2023 letter, I wrote about what we can lose when we surrender our communication choices to predictive text, including large language models like ChatGPT.
People continue improving these AI tools, and people continue to cede ground to AI in very human spaces, including both creativity and meaningful communication. Like Kahl in his coding work, people are seeking shortcuts without necessarily understanding the consequences.
In an article in The Atlantic in November, Lila Shroff discussed one of Apple’s new AI tools: AI-generated summaries of notifications, including summaries of received text messages (“Apple Lost the Plot on Texting”, 19 November 2024).
She pushes back against this idea, partly because it’s executed poorly (see the article for examples), and partly because the idea of summarizing text messages from people you know seems like a bad idea to begin with:
“But even when they are technically right, the AI summaries still feel wrong. ‘Expresses love and encouragement,’ one AI notification I recently received crudely announced, compressing a thoughtfully written paragraph from a loved one. What’s the point of a notification like that? Texting—whether on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal—is a deeply intimate medium, infused with personality and character. By strip-mining messages into bland, lifeless summaries, Apple seems to be misunderstanding what makes texting so special in the first place.”
She goes on to say, “With the social internet in crisis, text messages—and especially group chats—have filled a crucial void. In a sense, texting is the purest form of a social network, a rare oasis of genuine online connection.”
If we choose to use “notification summaries that strive to optimize our messages for maximum efficiency,” as Shroff describes them, we choose yet again to pay less attention to the people we love. For what?
Let’s keep communication human, attentive, from love. In our baking, coding, soup-making, texting, spending face-to-face time with humans, and whatever we do, let us live out of love.
May real love direct our attention, always.
The English Language, According to Merriam-Webster
I was double-checking my use of “jibes with”, and I found a delightful quote in Merriam-Webster’s usage guide:
“Because the English language is not fair. And anyone who ever told you otherwise does not have your best interests at heart.”
Writing Updates
I’m happy I chose to write a shorter letter for January. Somehow, there’s always more to do in life, around the house, etc. I am still working on my novel, and I have made some small progress since last month.
That’s it for this January! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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Scripture quotations (except where marked otherwise) are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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