If the people closest to you consistently get what’s left of your attention, what exactly are you calling love?
I’m starting to question whether we’re fully honest about this.
Among the executives I work with - and in my own life - I keep seeing the same pattern: the people who matter most often receive the most depleted version of us.
Not because they matter less, but because they are the ones least likely to push back. They’re stable enough to wait. So they do.
Everything else doesn’t wait. The inbox, the next decision, the next escalation - they all register in the nervous system. They create urgency, and urgency starts to feel like responsibility. Without noticing it, we organize our attention around that pull.
So we give our sharpness to what is loud, and what is deep gets what remains.
In long-term data like the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one pattern keeps surfacing: people rarely regret their decisions. They regret where their attention went - and where it didn’t.
Not a lack of love. A misallocation of attention.
That’s why the line from Simone Weil lands differently for me now: attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
If that’s true, then attention is not a side effect of love. It’s the clearest evidence of it.
And this is where it gets uncomfortable.
Because most of us are highly attentive where stakes are visible - and increasingly absent where the relationship feels secure. Not consciously. But consistently.
You can feel it. In conversations that never quite land. In children who get your efficiency but not your presence. In teams where people are managed, but not really met.
A Zen master once described attention as the most basic form of love.
Which makes the real question harder to avoid:
Who or what actually receives the best of my awareness - not occasionally, but consistently over time?
I’m not outside this.
But I’m starting to wonder whether some of the deepest regret later in life doesn’t come from what we did -
but from where our attention quietly kept going.