Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself

Attention makes things bloom (and its limits)

• Many report that almost anything becomes more interesting with sustained attention; mundane technical work, unit testing, or crafts reveal hidden richness.
• Some disagree, citing activities like Tetris where longer exposure produces boredom for most people; deepening isn’t universal.
• Several find this view uplifting but also bittersweet: there isn’t enough time in a single life to explore everything that would “bloom.”

Curiosity, empathy, and interpersonal attention

• Reframing “stupid questions” as puzzles about what others know or don’t know improved some commenters’ patience, listening, and communication.
• Adding “what am I missing?” to questions is seen as a lightweight attention trick that surfaces blind spots.

Spiritual, metaphysical, and materialist framings

• One subthread pushes a “manifestation / law of attraction” view: focused thought collapses the ethereal into the physical, making us “wizards” of reality.
• Others push back with a neuroscientific and evolutionary account: thoughts as brain processes, qualia as functional abstractions, and creativity as unconscious recombination rather than proof of a nonphysical ether.
• A compromise position: we don’t fully understand creativity or consciousness, but invoking extra metaphysical realms isn’t necessary.

Attention, ADHD, and brain mechanisms

• Multiple people connect the essay to the default mode network, rumination, and anxiety. One claims “buggy wiring” and blood-flow rerouting; others challenge this as speculative and conflate correlation with causation.
• There’s extensive discussion of ADHD: medication, hyperfocus, difficulty “choosing what to focus on,” and the idea of attention as inertial (hard to start, hard to stop).
• Some note lifestyle, nutrition, meditation, and exercise as helpful, but others emphasize anecdotes vs. real research and warn against overconfident causal stories.

Meditation, Buddhism, and jhanas

• Several see the essay as essentially describing samatha/concentration practice and jhanas: attention penetrating phenomena, dissolving veils, and generating bliss states.
• Others stress that meditation can expose the constructed nature of experience but can’t by itself “discover neurons” or external physics; experiments are still needed.
• A meta-critique: contemporary writing on jhanas often borrows heavily from Buddhist traditions while shying away from engaging with Buddhism as a system.

Positive and negative feedback loops

• Commenters resonate with attention “looping” as virtuous (flow, deep joy, sex, creativity, nature appreciation) or vicious (panic attacks, rumination, addiction).
• People with anxiety and hyper-awareness OCD describe exactly this: fixation heightens sensitivity to a sensation, which heightens distress, which further tightens focus.
• Some find that paying nonjudgmental attention to the feeling itself (not the thoughts) can break spirals; others emphasize allowing sensations to be present without rejecting them.

Everyday techniques to harness attention

• Popular micro-strategies:
  • “Give it full attention for 5 minutes; then you can stop” to overcome starting friction for work, exercise, or drawing.
  • Enter through a lower-bar action (“I’ll just hold the pencil and look at old sketches”) that almost inevitably leads into real engagement.
  • Using deadlines or delayed rewards (e.g., dinner after chores) to tap dopamine’s anticipation function.
• One theme: action often precedes motivation; momentum is built, not found.

Language and metaphors for attention

• Rich cross-linguistic exploration: pay, lend, give, make, spare, turn, place-your-heart, be-attentive, attach, use-nerves, “give eight,” etc.
• Several link these metaphors to views of consciousness: attention as spending a resource vs. being awareness itself.

Art, music, and deep listening

• Some artists use making art as a scaffold for attention, noticing both the cosmic and the mundane (“immortal superorganism” vs. sticky kid at the park).
• Multiple anecdotes about listening to music in the dark with high-quality audio or in specialized venues; when all distractions are removed, details and emotional depth emerge dramatically.
• This supports the essay’s claim that art can function as “guided meditation,” though one commenter says it feels more like “guided hallucination.”

Critiques of the essay and misc.

• Several praise the writing as inspiring and accurate to their experience.
• Others find it pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, or “LinkedIn rationalist” in tone; phrases like “deeply cohere their attentional field” are mocked.
• Some object to the sex example as juvenile or alienating, while others just ignore that part and keep the rest.
• Minor tangents touch on rituals, films that became classics through repeat exposure, .xyz domains and firewalls, and whether the title should have included “and bloom.”