Opinion | Chris Hayes: I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here is How I Mastered My Own.

I try to hold people’s attention for a living.For more than 13 years, I’ve been hosting a cable news show, and when I’m not doing that, I spend a lot of time alternating between reading the internet and obsessively posting my takes to various social media platforms.

I tell myself that this is for my job, that I must, as a professional duty, keep up on the news, but it’s a little like a tobacco executive with a two-pack-a-day habit.“Why am I like this?” I ask myself.What I want to say is that it’s not just me.From my perspective as both an attention merchant and a compulsive customer, it’s clear that the difficulty of sitting in one’s “own chamber” — as the philosopher Blaise Pascal described the freedom to sit undisturbed with one’s thoughts — is greatly exacerbated by the form of attention capitalism we are enmeshed in.Our attention is a wildly valuable resource, and some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at scale in increasingly sophisticated ways, leaving us feeling like bystanders to our minds.

You might say we’ve built a machine for producing boredom and then entertainment to fill it in an endlessly accelerating and desperate cycle.Boredom lurks around every corner in our lives.I’ve come to view it, specifically its avoidance, as the silent engine of modern life.

Attention, where we put our conscious thoughts in any given moment, is the substance of life.We are painfully aware of the constant claims on our attention — the buzz and zap of the phone and push notifications and texts and little red circles that alert us that there’s more to pay attention to that we haven’t even gotten to yet.Under this assault, it’s easy to feel that we’re trapped in an age that leaves no space for us to simply sit and think.

But it’s worth noting that as much as the current forms of attention capitalism exist to take our attention, there is some very deep part of us that wants it taken.In the wake of Donald Trump...