Hungry for the Gaze: Attention as a Modern Narcotic

There is a tiny glowing rectangle in my pocket that knows more about me than my pastor, my doctor, and my mother combined. Which is impressive, because my mother can tell I am lying just by hearing the word “fine.”

The rectangle is not evil. It is not a demon portal. It does not hiss sulfur when opened, though it does sometimes hiss, like a cat, when I turn the brightness up in a dark room and my eyes protest. The rectangle is not the problem.

The problem is that the rectangle is a slot machine.

Pull the lever, scroll the feed, refresh the inbox, tap the story, check the likes, peek at the views, look at the little number beside your name like a tiny digital halo. It is strange how the human heart can be trained to chase a number. We are mammals. We are made of bone and breath and memory and ache. And still we can become creatures who crave the click.

And we know this. We joke about it. We talk about being “online too much,” the way people talk about eating cake for breakfast. Ha ha, whoops, cake again. Only the cake, in this case, is other people noticing you. And the cake, in this case, has no bottom. It is a pan that keeps refilling.

That is why it begins to feel like a narcotic. Not because attention is bad in itself, but because the chasing of it can feel like a drug. A small rush. A soft warmth. A quick relief. Then a slump. Then a need.

And the need grows.

Here is the first uncomfortable truth. The desire to be seen is not a modern invention. We were needy long before we were wireless. We were longing before we were logged in. A baby cries and a mother’s face appears. That is a sacrament in miniature. I see you. I am here. You are not alone.

So yes, there is something holy in wanting to be noticed. It is stitched into us, because we are made by a God who notices. A God who names.

The danger is not that we want attention. The danger is that we want it disordered. Bent. Curved inward like a plant that turns toward a weak lamp because it has forgotten the sun.

Blaise Pascal understood this ache with unnerving clarity. He noticed that human beings are masters of diversion. We fill our days with noise, motion, amusement, and approval because stillness threatens us. Silence asks questions we would rather not answer. Pascal believed that much of our frantic activity is an effort not to feel our own smallness, our dependence, our longing for God.

Restlessness, for Pascal, is not just boredom. It is a flight. We flee ourselves. We flee the thought of God. We flee the quiet truth that we are not self-sufficient. Attention becomes one more diversion, one more way to stay distracted from the deeper hunger underneath.

This is where Saint Thomas Aquinas steps in, calm as a cathedral, and says, yes, there is a thing called vainglory. It is not just bragging. It is subtler than that. Vainglory is the habit of needing the glow of admiration. It is the itch that says, did they notice? Did they clap? Did they approve? And then the itch becomes an identity.

Vainglory is not only the peacock strutting in the courtyard. Vainglory is also the tired person in the corner trying to look like they are not tired. Vainglory is the clever joke posted not because it is true or kind but because it will be rewarded. Vainglory is the spiritual pose. The curated holiness. The saintly selfie, so to speak.

And still, it gets worse, because the attention economy is built to intensify the craving. A little attention is never enough. We need a new dose. The brain learns the pattern. The heart learns the pattern too. We begin to measure ourselves with external mirrors. We become dependent on being seen, and terrified of being unseen.

This is the enslaving turn. This is where desire slips into compulsion.

It looks like checking your phone and not knowing why. It looks like drafting a text and rewriting it six times so it lands just right. It looks like posting something and then hovering near it like a nervous parent at a playground. It looks like refreshing, refreshing, refreshing. It looks like feeling empty when the applause does not arrive.

It can also look like resentment. Because if attention is the drug, then someone else getting attention feels like theft. You see them praised and you feel your own hunger flare. You see them noticed and you feel invisible. The world becomes a crowded room where only a few people are under the spotlight, and everyone else is shifting their feet in the shadows, wondering if they matter.

Now the Catholic tradition does not merely diagnose. It also offers a path. Sometimes a sharp path. Sometimes a bright path. Sometimes a hidden path.

Saint John of the Cross, for example, is not interested in giving you a five-step plan to feel better about your screen time. He is interested in freedom. And freedom, he insists, is often purchased through purification. Which is a polite word for a kind of stripping.

We do not love that. We want hacks. We want settings. We want a feature called “turn off addiction.” But John of the Cross says, the craving itself must be purified. The appetite must be healed. You must learn to endure not being fed.

That sounds harsh until you realize he is talking about the pain that leads to a larger joy. He is talking about the painful freedom of no longer needing to be noticed.

Imagine that. Imagine walking into a room and not needing to be impressive. Imagine doing good quietly. Imagine being misunderstood and not rushing to correct it. Imagine being ordinary and being at peace. That is not defeat. That is liberation.

Saint Teresa of Ávila comes alongside, practical and fierce, and says that self-knowledge is the beginning of humility. Not self-hatred. Self-knowledge. The truth about who you are. The truth about what you chase. The truth about what you fear.

Teresa would probably ask a question like this. When you crave attention, what are you actually craving?

Is it love? Is it reassurance? Is it belonging? Is it a voice saying, you are safe. Is it a voice saying, you are enough? Is it a voice saying, you are not alone?

If so, then you do not need more eyes on you. You need the right gaze.

Because there is a gaze that does not consume you. There is a gaze that does not evaluate you like a product. There is a gaze that does not leave when the performance ends.

There is the gaze of our creator.

Simone Weil writes about attention in a way that flips the whole thing. For her, attention is not something to extract from others. It is something to offer. True attention is a form of love. It is a reverent presence. It is the refusal to use another person as a prop. It is the willingness to stay with what is real, even when it is not entertaining.

That is a staggering idea in a world trained to skim.

What if attention is not a drug, but a gift?

What if the problem is that we have turned it into a commodity, and then into a craving?

And what if the healing is to practice a new kind of attention, the kind that looks outward with tenderness, and inward with honesty, and upward with trust?

So what does redemptive re-ordering look like, concretely, on a weekday?

It looks like silence, first of all. Not the dramatic kind where you move to a monastery and communicate only through meaningful nods. The ordinary kind. Ten minutes without noise. A walk without headphones. A meal without the rectangle. A pause before replying.

Silence is not emptiness. Silence is a room where you can finally hear what you have been avoiding.

It looks like hiddenness. Doing one good thing that nobody knows about. Not as a stunt. Not as a humble brag. As medicine.

It looks like prayer that is not performative. Prayer as presence. Prayer as letting yourself be seen. The most radical sentence some of us can say is simply, Lord, here I am. I do not know what I am doing. I want to be loved. Help me.

It looks like the sacraments, which are the Church’s stubborn insistence that God meets us in the real. Not in the curated. Not in the edited. In water. In bread. In confession that tells the truth without drama. In Eucharist that says you do not have to manufacture your worth. You receive.

It looks like community that is not a crowd. A crowd watches you. A community knows you. A crowd rewards the performance. A community carries you when you cannot perform.

And then it looks like a personal reckoning. Not a vague sense that everyone is addicted these days. I mean you. I mean me. I mean the specific ways we chase the gaze.

Where do you seek attention in ways that leave you fragmented?

Where do you perform?

Where do you exaggerate?

Where do you refresh?

Where do you quietly despair when you are not noticed?

Where do you substitute being seen for being loved?

And then, with as much gentleness as you can manage, ask this…

What would change if I allowed myself to be seen first by God?

Not evaluated. Not ranked. Not scored.

Seen.

The God who sees the sparrow fall. The God who sees Nathaniel under the fig tree. The God who sees the widow and her small coins. The God who sees you when you are being brave in ways no one applauds. The God who sees you when you are bored and lonely and reaching for the rectangle like a child reaching for candy.

Seen first by God, then freed to love without needing a spotlight.

This is not a moralistic warning. It is not a cultural rant. I am not throwing your phone into a river. Also, please do not throw your phone into a river. Rivers are already dealing with enough.

This is an invitation to conversion. Which is another way of saying, an invitation to come home.

Because the deepest ache beneath our addiction to attention is not vanity. It is longing. It is the desire to matter. It is the desire to be held in someone’s mind and heart.

And the Catholic tradition, at its best, does not shame that desire. It baptizes it. It orders it. It aims it toward the only gaze that does not exhaust us.

The gaze that says, you are mine.

Not because you performed.

Not because you posted.

Not because you were impressive.

Because you are loved without measure.

So maybe today we practice a small sobriety. Not the grim kind. The grateful kind. We practice noticing the real people in front of us. We practice being where our bodies are. We practice giving attention as a form of love. We practice silence like a cool drink.

And we practice, slowly, the brave and humbling art of not needing the room to look at us, because we are already looked upon by the One who made the room, and the river, and the ridiculous glowing rectangle, and even our restless hearts.

And that is enough.

Or at least, it is a beginning.