Chapter the Twenty-Fifth: In Which Attention Is Identified as a Luxury Tax
On the Productive Exhaustion of the Informed Citizen
There is a particular variety of tiredness that has no polite name. Not grief, not illness, not the ordinary fatigue that sleep addresses. It is the tiredness that accumulates in people who have made the mistake of paying attention — of reading past the headline, of following the procedural thread to its conclusion, of asking the second question when the first question’s answer was already unpleasant enough.
One does not recommend this habit. And yet.
The satirist’s problem — if one may be permitted a brief professional complaint — is that the work requires genuine attention. You cannot mock what you have not first understood. You cannot trace the shape of an absurdity without holding still long enough for it to resolve. This is, on its surface, a reasonable requirement. In practice, it means spending a great deal of time in close proximity to things designed specifically to resist close proximity.
A press release is written to be skimmed. A legislative hearing is scheduled at nine in the morning on a Tuesday. A regulatory rollback is announced on the Friday afternoon before a holiday, in language so deliberately inert that even the journalists tasked with covering it write with the glazed efficiency of people who have somewhere else to be. These are not accidents of bureaucratic aesthetics. They are policy. The unreadability is the point.
To read them carefully is to accept a tax. I have been paying it for some time, and I will not pretend the ledger is uncomplicated.
There is a theory — respectable, widely held — that a democracy requires an informed citizenry. This theory is correct. It is also, in its way, rather funny, which is not how it is usually presented.
Consider what the informed citizenry is being asked to hold. At any given moment: the status of several ongoing legal proceedings, each with its own procedural vocabulary; the composition of regulatory bodies most people could not name on a Tuesday and could name even less well on a Wednesday; the humanitarian emergencies competing for the same paragraph of attention; the quarterly earnings of companies whose lobbyists wrote the bill that will determine whether those emergencies receive a federal response.
One is expected to hold all of this, and also to care about it, and also to vote. One is expected to do this while working and raising children and managing the various domestic emergencies that do not pause because the Senate is in session.
The requirement is, considered plainly, absurd. And the people who designed the requirement know this. The complexity is not a regrettable side effect of governance. It is governance’s most reliable tool.
There comes a point — and I will confess it here, with the mild embarrassment of someone admitting to a perfectly predictable condition — where the attention begins to cost more than it returns. Where the careful reading produces not clarity but a kind of accumulating weight that is indistinguishable, after a while, from paralysis. Where one reads about the thing, understands the thing, writes something pointed and true about the thing, and then watches the thing proceed entirely unaffected.
This is not a crisis of faith. It is something quieter and more tedious than that. It is simply the recognition that the feedback loop is broken — that the people who most need to feel the satirist’s needle have, by now, developed a tolerance. They have been inoculated by quantity.
One keeps writing anyway. Not from optimism, exactly. More from a conviction that the alternative — looking away, choosing the comfort of not knowing — is a worse thing to be than tired.
But let no one pretend the conviction comes free.
The weariness, one eventually understands, is not a side effect. It is the product.
An exhausted citizenry does not march. It watches something for a while, feels the brief, clarifying anger, and then — because the next thing has arrived, because there is always a next thing, because the architecture of modern attention has been optimized for exactly this outcome — it moves on.
The news cycle is not a river. It is a managed flood. And the people managing it understand, better than they are usually given credit for, that a population ankle-deep in water cannot run.
The sensible response is not to stop paying attention. It is to understand that tiredness is not weakness, is not defeat, is not evidence of some failure of civic character. It is the predictable outcome of a system designed to produce it.
One rests. One starts again. One finds, usually, that the irony has accumulated while one wasn’t looking, and the next thing has obligingly presented itself, and there is — there is always — no shortage of material.
A society that never runs out of material is not a society that should congratulate itself.