My grandfather was born in the Swiss village of Curaglia, the largest and most northerly in a smattering of settlements along the Val Medel, or Medel Valley.
The valley is far and shallow and bright green in the summers; the wind through it sweeps low along the grasses for miles until it reaches Curaglia, where the sheer, stiff Alps force it to swirl into a calm around the valley floor and foothills. The houses are square, white-walled, shingled with dark oak. Each fence is handmade from knotted and rippling wood that took days to shape, sand, and implant in the soft earth.
Each inch of a village like his is rich with history and craftsmanship. The roads are hand-cut cobblestone or dirt paths maintained with regular maintenance by locals. Houses are owned, built, and repaired by the same steady hands, and the children of families like my grandfather’s drank the milk of the livestock they spent long hours herding up and down the Alps.
This specific strain of effort and attention to craftsmanship is rarer today. In modern America, fences are mass-produced and loaded onto truck beds at Home Depot, not hand-cut. Houses are designed and produced in huge suburban swaths by individual companies.
Many of these replacements are logical, and none are inherently bad. It’s natural that, as technology advances, people will need to put less effort into things. The issue is what’s lost in cutting out the process of creation. No one giving their mother a “World’s Greatest Mom” mug from Target on Mother’s Day can show her how they shaped the clay to fit her hands, or how they notched the handle to suit where she always tucks her pinkie finger.
In 1950, just before my grandfather left Curaglia for the U.S., the population of his county, Medel, was 614. As of December 2020, it was 344. The place he left is dissolving behind him. Even in the most remote reaches of the Alps, his native Romansh is yielding to German and Balkan dialects.
His house in Sylmar, California feels like a museum to his childhood. In romantic portraits, little lederhosen-clad boys guide puffball sheep through sparkling green-and-gray mountainsides. Issues of the last Romansh newspaper still circulating lie on his coffee table. Thick copper cowbells sit on his mantle, red straps embroidered with tiny bursts of edelweiss flowers.
These are artifacts to a place and culture that no longer exists, at least not in the same way my grandfather experienced it. The edelweiss flower especially. Growing up, it was a symbol of dedication—it only grew high in the Alps, and rarely, so to receive a flower was to know that someone loved you enough to climb and search for hours.
Photo of my grandfather near Curaglia. Back of the photo is labeled, “Tat [my grandfather] search for edelweiss.”
The edelweiss is emblematic of the values of a generation disappearing behind us. The crafts of my grandfather’s generation are fading in practice and relevance. Not just the sewing of certain clothes, but the speaking of languages like Romansh, the making of certain heritage foods, and the celebration of traditions like the hunt for edelweiss or the cattle festivals in spring. Markers of culture fade without the necessary effort applied to maintain them.
These cultural traditions are valuable, and putting in effort to preserve them certainly seems valiant, but it feels impossible to sit and spend hours learning to make spaetzle when I could buy boxed mac and cheese for less than a dollar and make it in less than a minute. As the world makes more demands on our time, sacrificing it for something that isn’t guaranteed to be pleasurable or beneficial feels like a painful waste.
Longer hours, later retirement ages, and different personal responsibilities for the average American adult signify that modern America is not designed for traditional, intensive cultural practice. People working 9-to-5 jobs are not meant to spend three hours preparing each meal or make clothes by hand because they simply do not have enough time. Time scarcity makes it difficult to not feel like you’re falling behind if you’re hand-rolling noodles with a spoon and your peers are dumping cheese powder in the microwave, but it feels worse to watch your great-aunt make spaetzle and realize you have no idea how—that when she’s gone, no one in your family will.
Another recent iteration of embracing the long way, though, has come in the form of the so-called “trad,” or traditional, influencing world. Former model and current Mormon mother Nara Smith posts videos to TikTok in which she spends hours laboriously making her family’s food from scratch, always made-up and clothed in couture dresses. Past videos have included Hot Cheetos, graham crackers, and Coca-Cola created wholly in the Smiths’ kitchen. Viewers respond with admiration, surprise, or abject confusion. The majority of her audience has intensive school, work, or childcare responsibilities that place hard limits on their free time. To them, spending five hours making Hot Cheetos from polenta when they cost a grand total $2.50 and a two-minute gas station stop makes little sense—yet her content is undeniably compelling. Her rejection of modern convenience is a countercultural act and an intriguing hook to millions of viewers. The amount of time she spends making food from scratch, contradictorily, creates immense value in the form of her audience’s attention.
Philosopher Simone Weil’s writing on attention best exemplifies how time spent on a task can correspond to value. Weil writes in her essay “Attention and Will” that “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Attention is value. Attention, in high concentrations, can create a connection to the divine. I like the democratic element of this theory; the idea that a connection with God is not the result of something mystical and unrealizable for the untrained, but only the product of extreme care and focus.
My grandfather, a devout Catholic and a man staunchly wary of smartphones, might have agreed. Was he praying, in a way, when he focused completely on traversing the Alps and finding edelweiss? Was his mother’s cooking a religious event, or his time spent roaming mountain sides with his goats?
Unmixed attention isn’t limited in practice to idyllic pastorals. An act of religious attention can be absolute engagement with a book, extreme focus on a problem set, or even undiluted concentration on a TikTok. It isn’t the medium that matters most, but the means. Some mediums, though, like short-form videos, are less conducive to full attention, and the advent of these in proportion to others can be blamed, at least in part, for a shift in the potency and quality of attention.
Weil also claims that “The amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention and thus of authentic religion at that period.” She understood “extreme attention” as an absolutely unmixed, intentional focus on an object or practice, and a commitment to engaging with it fully. True creativity, to her, is possible only through extreme attention, a resource that seems to be becoming scarce. Researcher Gloria Mark reported that, in 2004, the average attention span of her research subjects on any screen was two and a half minutes; in 2012, it was 75 seconds. Her most recent version of the study averaged out to 47 seconds.
Nara Smith’s audience is usually with her for less than a minute before their attention is shunted onto the next video in their feed. In such little time, it’s unlikely that they can develop Simone Weil’s deep brand of attention toward her content.
There’s this pervasive, panopticon-like sense of being watched that accompanies any venture into content creation, even if it’s as simple as posting an Instagram story on a private account, that makes the disappearance of the “I” and forgetting the audience impossible. Short-form videos are getting increasingly shorter and increasingly diverting, with many videos spliced together in a split-screen format that preempts any possibility of boredom. Attention is becoming diluted, yet inescapable.
The surest means of developing Weil’s extreme attention is simple: doing something because you want to. My grandfather loved hiking until the day he died. He forded an original trail in the mountains near Sylmar that is still named for him, and he used it only days before becoming bedridden. I can’t claim to know the inside of his mind, but I like to imagine that he climbed into the Alps to find edelweiss not because he thought the other boys of Val Medel would think better of him, but because he wanted to. He wanted to hike so high the air thinned to a razor’s cold sharpness. He wanted to show someone he loved them. That purity of motive enabled his attention.
Full attention is worth it. It was worth it to my grandfather. It was worth it to Simone Weil. It’s worth it to the remaining speakers of Romansch, and to Nara Smith. Faster solutions are certainly reasonable, but if you’re starting to suspect, like I am, that Weil is onto something, try attending to a task for a few minutes a day. Spend 15 minutes journaling and thinking of nothing else. Watch a movie and commit yourself wholly to its world. Go for a walk without your phone, or close your eyes and listen to a song, and you may transcend, just a little, toward what Weil called God.