Attention as a Force

AND The capito-enviornmental chrisis of our modern day: a play in eight jokes

Alora Young presents|Savants&Syntax| Week of AUGUST 5th, 2026

This Week’s Update

I wrote 13K words in one day, almost beating my record of 15k from last spring. That makes 50K new words! That’s WAYYYY too many words! I will figure it out tho! I would just like to note that if you want to become a paid subscriber, all the money I earn from this Substack goes straight back into my work to change the world with my writing. Submitting to Literary magazines and writing competitions ( which costs money), and making new, exciting products for neurodivergent people that nobody else is willing to make! ( which cost way more money!) If you feel a desire to support me on my journey, it would mean so much! Thank you for believing in me!

HIGHLIGHT

CYAPSS TRAINING!!!!!!!

Featured Poem

The capito-enviornmental chrisis of our modern day: a play in eight jokes

A: What do you call a boat full of cows marooned on an island?

B: Run aground beef

A:What do you call a sodium chloride molecule that dresses like a 2012 hipster?

B: An Ironic Compound

A:What do you call the sleep-wake cycle of someone from the Great White North?

B: A canadian rhythm

A:What do you call a medical college full of people who can’t remember to keep things secret?

B: A HIPPA campus

A:What do you call a theorized video call that combines the three spatial dimensions with one temporal dimension?

B: the Facetime continuum

A:What do you call a Darwinian gameshow where you party till you drop and the last one standing gets a million dollars?

B: Survival of the littest.

A;What do you call an international shipping company that sells housing crises?

B:Amazon Sub Prime

A;What do you call a French art museum dedicated to fast, dangerous downhill, competitive supine sledding on a very slippery slope?

B: The Luge

Featured Essay

Attention as a Force

Alora Young

I have this concept called trace tracking theory, which is a concept I’m developing around the notion that we build what we recognize in our lives through repeated traces that surround us. So if you pay attention to poetry in your everyday life, if you’re like, I look here and I look at this tree and suddenly that’s a poem, I hear lines of poetry, I recognize the poetry in this, that’s poetic trace.

There are four kinds of trace. There’s poetic trace. There’s safety trace, when you look around yourself and you try to, as an autistic person, train yourself to recognize when things may be dangerous, so you start to train yourself throughout the day and you’re like, okay, it’s one o’clock, we’re going to look and see what around me could be dangerous right now. That’s safety trace. Then there is romantic trace, where you try to train yourself to recognize what small things that you do in your daily life could be beneficial to your romantic relationship, and then there is critical trace, where you try to interrogate the world around you critically, as in the teachings of bell hooks, where you try to be a critical thinker about the world around you and interrogate things further than you normally would.

So that’s trace tracking theory, and the theory is basically that you can train what your brain recognizes in day-to-day life through repeated, purposeful training of your attention to be aware of traces. The second concept that ties into trace tracking theory is attention as a force.

My concept of attention as a force is that in scientific experiments, specifically double-slit experiments, when you observe a particle, it changes its state. A quark changes its state based on superposition when it is observed or acted upon by an outside force, and there was for a long time the notion that somebody observing quantum superposition would affect the quantum superposition by ending it, and that led to the notion that our attention, in and of itself, is a force. Our looking at something, our observing something, is a force that affects the world around us.

There are several kinds of particles, but quarks are my favorite kind of particle, so that’s what I focus on. Everything on the scale of particles goes into quantum superposition because that’s the quantum scale, it’s down there, Planck scale, and basically the particles in an unobserved state, an unacted-upon state, do not change, they exist in quantum superposition, and then when acted upon by energy or observation, they pick a state. They’re like, well, we’re going to do one thing now.

I actually use the concept of observable quantum superposition in one of my books to create a non-nato-dimensional periodic table of elements that uses particles that are able to exist perceivably in superposition in order to make a new layer of atoms and particles that can be observed in superposition, and then I wrote a sci-fi novel about it. It’s going to be an audio drama. I got funding to make it this year. That’s not the essay, but I think it’s pretty lit.

The essay is: How is our attention a force in the lives of the people around us?

By paying attention to a child, you literally are teaching that child what it feels like to have attention paid to them, because a baby doesn’t know the experience of being attended to until someone teaches it what it’s like to be attended to, and that comes to my question of what are we doing to children by putting them in front of devices that cannot pay attention back. What happens to a child when they are raised by a device that cannot respond or interact with them by paying attention back to them?

The kids aren’t all right. I’m a teacher too. The kids are not all right. iPads are bad at their job. Correction. iPads are bad at parenting. At least we got therapy and, like, a submodicum of attention from our parents. I worry. Also, are they going to be able to read? Is Gen Beta going to be able to read? Somebody help.

Everything behaves differently when observed, and the question I have is, in terms of children who are under-attended to, because nothing changes unless it’s interacted with, in order to change the people our children become for the better, we owe them human attention, and I think that because they grow up not being paid attention to, it creates a feedback loop.

It’s the difference between stimulation and attention. They’re not the same thing. Stimulation and attention can be different because attention presumes intent. An iPad produces stimulation, but it doesn’t see you back. It doesn’t love you, and love, as we have discussed, is in and of itself the strongest form of attention. Attention is fundamentally an interaction that changes a system over time, and children are organizing themselves as children. When we grow up, we organize ourselves in response to interaction. That’s how attachment theory works. That’s how co-regulation and our neural development work. A child’s brain develops through responsive interaction, and stimulation is going to stimulate, but it’s not going to respond and interact.

So when we deny our children attention, we are fundamentally denying them attachment. We are fundamentally denying them the ability to develop co-regulation skills, and we are impacting and damaging their neural development. I think the most important distinction is that an iPad is stimulation, is input with no relationship, no feedback loop, and no recognition of the child as a subject.

Because think about it this way: You have to be recognized as a subject by other people around you in order to develop your sense of self, because we develop our identities, our sense of self-esteem, all of these things, in response to how people have treated us. You might think, I’m a smart person, and you might identify as smart rather than pretty because people around you said you’re smart, you’re smart, you’re smart when you were growing up, or you got good grades, or something gave you the feedback that you were smart, and you may have never gotten any sort of input as to whether you were pretty.

You may have been pretty, but being smart was more recognizable to people, and so you developed the notion that you’re not pretty because you saw other people getting feedback that they were pretty and you didn’t get feedback that you were pretty, and now you perceive yourself as less attractive because, during your developmental years, your brain was not trained to have the feedback and recognize and build your sense of self around the idea that you have the ability to be attractive to people.

That’s why it’s dangerous. That’s why it’s so dangerous for children. AI is dangerous for anyone who doesn’t have a strong sense of self. If you’re lonely, AI is extremely dangerous because what is being lonely other than lacking attention as a force in your life? And that’s the most dangerous thing someone can be in your life, is a yes man, because a yes man never pushes back, never challenges you, and never tries to get you to be better.

Love being sustained, responsive, invested attention over time makes love inherently an act. Love is inherently an act, just like intention, attention itself is a form of intention, attention is an act, and I think we need to talk about that more because we are being literally robbed of our attention every single day by social media. We live in an attention economy. People have commodified and monetized and kidnapped our attention, and we need to talk about that because what it’s doing to our children is dangerous.

Basically what happens without attention is a child signals, they give you a signal of I’m happy, and nobody smiles back, and their internal states don’t get named. Nobody says, oh, you look sad, Timmy. You self-organize your nervous system because of the interactions you have with other people, and when you have to self-organize your nervous system based on faulty information or no input at all, you develop dysregulation, you have difficulty developing identity, and you seek stimulation instead of connection, which is just as dangerous, and it’s putting a lot of kids that we have these days in grave danger.

We’ve seen what happens. It all comes back to attachment theory. How does a child behave when their parent did not give them the attention they needed to develop into a person who has secure attachments?

My main arguments that I’m proposing are that responsive attention is fundamental for shaping healthy pathways in children, and the absence of attention leaves their systems, their neurological systems, unstructured, and that artificial stimulation does not and cannot replace intentional interaction. You can be communicated with by technology in some ways, especially now with AI, but they can’t recognize you, they can’t love you, and they can’t adapt to your inner state. Your AI can’t look at you sitting there on the couch before you even open the app and say, something’s wrong, and you’re like, no, nothing’s wrong, and they’re like, I’ve known you for ten years, I know something’s wrong.

Children need to be met. They don’t just need input. They need to be met by a human. Have you ever heard of the cloth mother versus wire mother experiment that they did with monkeys? They literally had an experiment where they had a fake monkey that was made of wire that had milk and a fake monkey that was made of soft, fluffy fabric, and consistently, the baby monkeys chose the monkey that was made of soft, fluffy fabric that they could cuddle, that they could feel love or warmth from, over the one with nutrients, and that goes to show children are desiring that affection, that closeness, that humanity, that attention. Keeping the child alive is no longer enough. You have to attend to, you have to pay attention to the child for that child to grow up and be okay.

I don’t think any child is a lost cause. I think it fundamentally starts with reestablishing a notion of trust and mutual understanding between you and your child. Your child has to trust you in order to want to talk to you, and they don’t trust somebody who has never shown that they will be there for them.

Children cannot self-regulate yet, especially small children. They don’t know how. You have to co-regulate small children because they have not learned and they don’t have the neurological wiring to self-regulate yet. They don’t know how. They physically can’t. Your child needs you to regulate.

Attention in being participation is an example of how love is the choice to participate in another person so consistently and so completely that they become more fully themselves because you were there. You have to teach a child how to become themselves. You have to teach a child how to recognize themselves.

This is what I have always wanted from society. I wanted a salon. I wanted people to come together and think and think beautifully. I wanted to be in a place where I could sit with my intellectual equals and say, we are going to discuss something, and we are going to be genuine about it, and we’re all neurodivergent, so we’re not going to have any of that weird subtext that makes things fucky, you know. We’re just going to be completely straightforward, honest, open, and intellectually excited.

And that’s the way we’re supposed to do it. That’s self-regulating. Period. My mother always says, if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Closing Note

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Thank you for reading and signing up for my newsletter. I could not have imagined so many of you would actually subscribe. I even got some paid subscribers! (shout out to my aunts and uncles and momma J)

I would just like to note that if you want to become a paid subscriber, all the money I earn from this Substack goes straight back into my work to change the world with my writing. Submitting to Literary magazines and writing competitions ( which costs money), and making new, exciting products for neurodivergent people that nobody else is willing to make! ( which cost way more money!) If you feel a desire to support me on my journey, it would mean so much! Thank you for believing in me!

If you enjoyed this, feel free to leave a comment or message me. You all mean so much to me, and I’m really glad I did the impulsive thing and just jumped right in to creating with abandon. That is my job after all.

May the spirit of Octavia Butler be with you,

Lomeister, out.

~Alora Young