About 2,000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca warned of a crisis of attention. The problem wasn’t caused by smartphones or TikTok; it was because papyrus had become more widely available. As a result, scrolls became plentiful and wealthy readers had access to more texts than ever before.
Seneca observed that the minds of those who read too many scrolls too quickly became restless and unsteady. This kind of mind was less able, he noted, to “stay in one place and spend time with itself.”
The lesson then was no less true than it is now, in our perpetually distracted, screen-addled, multitasking age. When we allow ideas to come and go in rapid succession, we keep our minds too busy and wear them out. Nothing sticks. “One who is everywhere is nowhere,” Seneca cautioned.
Seneca did not have access to modern scientific studies or survey data, but he would not have been surprised by our plight. Professors report that students now have difficulty watching feature-length films, let alone finishing books. On average, we check email 77 times a day, and often it’s not because of a notification — we interrupt ourselves. We’re not even able to focus on our devices: Two decades ago, a given task could hold our attention for two and a half minutes; today, research shows, we make it only 47 seconds on one screen before succumbing to the itch to switch.
Our society tends to view this as a technological problem that demands technological countermeasures: anti-distraction apps that act like digital wardens and lock us out of our other apps; plastic phone jails equipped with kitchen timers; $500 minimalist phones that have the revolutionary feature of having no features at all.
But we’re overcomplicating a very old challenge that is more moral than digital. Seneca rightly saw distraction as a failure of character. We don’t need another algorithm or gadget to stop our minds from running around like unruly children, he would have argued. We need to relearn how to sit still with our own thoughts.
How exactly do you do this? Seneca had some practical advice, which he outlined in his “Letters From a Stoic”: Devote your attention to one idea a day.
For the past 20 years, I’ve practiced a simple discipline inspired by this advice. First thing in the morning, I forage in a book for my one idea. Typically, it takes about three to four pages (less than 10 minutes) to find one. I’m not looking for a memorable quotation or aphorism; I’m looking for a passage that challenges or better illuminates how I see the world.
Recently, for example, I was struck by a tragic realization near the end of Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” On the brink of death, Ivan cannot escape the feeling that life has passed him by. And yet he had achieved all the “right” things — the good job, the nice house, the fancy friends. It’s a sobering reminder that social standing and worldly goods are fleeting. Friendship, love, a deep sense of purpose beyond oneself, a connection to the transcendent: These are what matter in the end.
Having found my idea, I took the next step Seneca advises: “to ponder that day and digest.” So I took Ivan’s realization with me while I drank my morning coffee. Three sips in, I began auditing my own priorities. I found myself wondering: How was I nurturing the relationships that sustain me? Learning to love people better was a challenge I needed to face. I committed to reaching out that week to three friends with whom I’d fallen out of touch.
At lunchtime and again during my afternoon coffee break, I pondered Ivan’s question and directed my attention to the life around me. Walking my dog later, I stopped on a bridge over the Colorado River and listened to the birds sing. By bedtime, I wasn’t fretting about the messages piled up in my inbox.
Seneca compared the benefits of deep reflection to the alchemy by which bees transform nectar into honey. In the hive, bees repeatedly pass the nectar they gather among themselves, mixing it with enzymes that alter its chemical composition. Think of the nectar as information and the honey as wisdom. Whereas nectar sours within a matter of days, honey doesn’t spoil — not even after being buried for thousands of years in an Egyptian tomb.
Seneca’s honey metaphor corresponds to what psychologists call deep processing: By returning to the same idea repeatedly, we signal to our brain that the idea is worth moving into the architecture of long-term memory. Each time we retrieve an idea from memory, we also wrap it in new associations (a process known as reconsolidation), which ensures that those ideas remain relevant to our life as time goes on.
That is what was happening as I churned Ivan Ilyich over in my mind throughout my day. My own experiences and thoughts alchemized Tolstoy’s warning into a personal conviction that would start to form part of my character.
I am hardly the first person to appreciate Seneca’s insight that a crowded library is no match for a curated portfolio of deeply assimilated wisdom. Marcus Aurelius tested one Stoic principle a day against the chaos of war. Elizabeth I drew on a well of carefully digested wisdom from Seneca and Cicero to handle the pressures of ruling. Abraham Lincoln owned few books but mastered them all. By reading aloud and chewing on the likes of Aesop and Shakespeare as a young man, he forged a mind he compared to steel: “very hard to scratch anything on” but “almost impossible, after you get it there, to rub it out.”
I thought of Lincoln the other day as I pondered the character called the Autodidact in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel “Nausea.” This strange fellow haunts the local library with the goal of reading every book in alphabetical order. Stuffed with facts but starved for meaning, he embodies the belief that volume of information is a substitute for depth of understanding.
By anchoring each day in a single idea, I’ve spent 20 years trying to avoid the Autodidact’s hollow fate. I no longer chase the endlessly receding horizon of staying informed. I’ve traded the anxiety of the shallows for the untapped wisdom of deep waters.
We are often told that more information is the answer, but Seneca knew better. Wisdom is found not in the nectar we gather, but in the honey we take the time to make with it.
