Ode to the Attention Monger

It may be a pathology when practiced to the extreme, but seeking attention from others lies at the core of human needs for connection and partnership and therefore at the center of human sociality.

The type of attention request that feels juvenile when seen in others and causes sheepishness when recognized in ourselves is also an extension of regard and affection for those whom it seems more often meant to annoy.

It is made up of an action or a saying that is generally unnecessary for functional purposes. Something sharp or clever or unusual. A negative statement or question (“So you’re not going to the fair because you hate amusement?”) when a neutral one would have done just as well (“Are you going to the fair?”). Often, within the home, partners will ask for help finding items when they know full-well their location or will pretend not to have heard an answer in order to ask its question again. “Did you say the jams are in thus cupboard now?”

Social researcher Brene Brown says that people live for connection. It is “why we’re here,” as she says.*  I think these calls for attention are a plea for that.  Negative or positive, they bring people into contact with the speaker. They engage a mutual sense of logic and purpose, a common space where the two or three or four are intimate players.  Someone has put something somewhere and now someone else must retrieve it. There is a partnership that is necessary, and acknowledging the partnership is key to satisfying the connection.  If the hearer were to find the item without announcing himself or asking for directions: no connection, no partnership.  Just two parties accidentally working in tandem.

Clearly, this kind of connection-seeking is not meant to be practicable, and it is true that actual teams can work together better and more quickly in silence – given prior agreement.  But we should also acknowledge that “prior consent” is important and that few people can do diligent, valuable work for very long without any hope of return from a team member.  Novelists might be an exception and yet, by their own accounts, they connect daily with the plots and characters in their books, crafting together in the moment and amounting to perhaps the most solid partnership of all.   

How nice to be able to conclude that attention-seeking is not necessarily as reprehensible as it may have at first promised to be.

In a final note, it is wroth pointing out that, at the times at which a person otherwise needing connection is not interested in soliciting it, his initial affection for or respect for his interlocutor must be examined.  For, it is in the cases in which these latter properties are missing that a person is least likely to engage his company in the efforts of connecting together.

Therefore, do let’s take as a compliment any action which draws unnecessary attention to a person who may be speaking to us.  Take as compliment and then decide whether to respond benevolently or not.  Ensuing guilt then properly allocated accordingly.