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Mental health Look at me: why attention6seeking is

the defining need of our times
Leo Benedictus
Mon 5 Feb 2018
06.00 GMT

1817 833

Illustration: Nishant Choksi

The urge to belong is universal. So would a better

understanding of it help tackle loneliness 9 and explain why
stalkers, spree killers and jihadists turn their pain on others?

T
here is a famous Jewish mother joke. You’ve heard it before.
Question: How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a
lightbulb? Answer: “Ah no, I’ll just sit in the dark. Don’t worry
about me.” It’s funny, at least the first time, because people do
behave like this. “Hey, over here!” they shout. “Ignore me! Ignore me!”

Everyone needs attention, like we need to eat. This is not controversial, nor
is it hard to understand. But the idea must be slippery, because it will not
stick. If we could keep in mind that people need attention, it would change
the way we see almost everything they do, from art to crime, from romance
to terrorism. And we must. Facebook alone harvests and sells the attention most viewed
of 1.4 billion people every day. That’s about a fifth of the world. This alarms Live Coronavirus live news:
some people, and it is a big change. But we can’t know what to make of it Trump 'tests negative' for
until we understand what people need attention for. Covid; major vaccine trial
paused
Attention is other people thinking about you, and if there were ever
humans who didn’t need it, they are now extinct. “Attention is one of the Trump holds packed rally
most valuable resources in existence for social animals,” says Dr Geoff after Covid diagnosis as he
struggles in polls
MacDonald, a psychologist at the University of Toronto with an interest in
Sign up for Lab
human connection. “It was literally a matter of life and death. The people
Notes 2 the
who didn’t feel good around others, or didn’t feel bad when they were Peru opens Machu Picchu
Guardian's weekly
science update ruins for one tourist
separated from others, wouldn’t have the motivation to do the things that
Read more are required to pass their genes down the generations.”

Specifically, people have been shown to need a type of attention that Malaysia's Anwar Ibrahim
psychologists call belonging. Abraham Maslow put belonging into his to meet king in decades2
long push to become PM
famous hierarchy of needs in 1943. In 1995, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary
concluded in their paper The Need to Belong that the available research did
indeed show that everyone has a “strong desire to form and maintain Business class was my
interpersonal attachments”. In particular, they identified that belonging chance to get home. After
24 hours of niceness, I wish
means getting positive attention from people who know you well.
I had my $7,000 back
Lewis Jackson
This isn’t hard to understand either. Someone who
thinks well of you is more likely to cooperate with you.
Or even mate with you, if you’re lucky. But their
opinion only really counts if they’ve spent a lot of time
with you, because that makes their idea of who you are
more accurate, and only accurate approval is secure. “If
you feel like you’re accepted for false reasons then
that’s bound to create anxiety,” MacDonald says.

People who feel they don’t belong suffer terribly, and

experience health problems comparable to smoking or
obesity. They are the 18% of British adults who
reported always (4%) or often (14%) feeling lonely, in a
study published last year by the British Red Cross and
Co-op. There are more lonely people in Britain than live
in London. The problem is now obvious enough for the
government to appoint a so-called “minister of
loneliness”, Tracey Crouch.

The word loneliness is a good description of the feeling,

but not its cause, which in reality has little to do with
being alone. According to the report, just 22% of people
who live alone feel lonely always or often, not much
Illustration: Nishant more than the 18% national average. Among 16-to-24-
Choksi year-olds, on the other hand, the proportion is 32%.
This shouldn’t be surprising. “Generally, loneliness
seems to be a matter more of a lack of intimate connections than of a lack
of social contact,” Baumeister and Leary wrote. Lonely people lack
attention that is positive and accurate, in short.

So why don’t they ask for more? Because attention can be harvested only
from the minds of other people, and high-quality attention won’t come by
force. “In anthropological terms, it’s a gift economy,” says Dr Amy Pollard
of the Mental Health Foundation (MHF), a charity that campaigns on
loneliness. “You’re creating bonds of reciprocity, which is where the
belonging comes from.” This means you only have as much high-quality
attention as people want to give you. And asking for more – attention-
seeking – is a signal that, in your case, they don’t want to give much. This
isn’t fair. Nor is it reliable. (People can misjudge you.) But the idea that
lonely people don’t deserve attention comes to us instinctively, as when we
see an empty restaurant with a busy one next door.

Some lonely people themselves conclude that they aren’t worthy of

attention, and withdraw from the world still further. Others search for a
feeling of belonging, not always in the best way. Seek positive attention too
openly and you get called “narcissist”. Seek attention from your family
with great displays of wanting to be ignored, and they’ll put you in a Jewish
mother joke. There are many ways of asking without asking, if we are
prepared to notice. Why, for instance, is it taboo to suggest that people who
self-harm, or have anorexia, might want attention? Is that not a source of
pain worth taking seriously?

One way to seek attention is to do

something that gets lots of it – art,
politics, crime, journalism maybe –
but that seems to have another
purpose. The purpose matters.
Otherwise you risk the special scorn
reserved for people who are
“famous for being famous”.

When Jamie Jewitt entered Love

Island on ITV2 last July, he was
depressed. A successful model
based in New York, he had returned
to Essex to live with his parents, then did nothing for years. His family all
but forced him to join the show, aged 27, in the hope that it would shake
him from his torpor.

In modelling, Jewitt explains over coffee, Instagram is non-negotiable.

“You wouldn’t get work,” he says, “if you didn’t get a following.” In
practice, this is quite easy for a model to do: just feed the public appetite
for carefully posed and manipulated “snapshots”. Over time Jewitt
gathered 13,000 followers. He enjoyed their compliments and exchanged
messages with some. It was almost friendship. “You tell yourself you’re
getting the real thing,” he says, “but it’s so hard to tell the difference.” He
found he’d switch between bursts of activity and guilty silences. “I felt like
a hypocrite, like a sellout. It was a big part of why I got unhappy. You feel
isolated, but you don’t know why.”

Illustration: Nishant
Choksi
When arriving on Love Island, all contestants must surrender their phones.
Inside, there are no TVs, no iPads, no contact at all with the outside. “You
have to talk to people,” Jewitt says. “Get to know them, make friends.”
What we never saw on Love Island were the hours upon hours of intense
conversation. “On mine and Camilla [Thurlow]’s dates, all we’d talk about
was books,” Jewitt recalls, “and none of that made it! People don’t want to
hear that crap, do they?”

It’s funny that it took a reality show to make Jewitt live authentically again.
“After two days I would wake up in the morning feeling so relieved,” he
says. “It was unbelievable. A fresh start. The sad thing was I could have
done it at any point on the outside.” Today he and Thurlow are still
together, and the islanders remain close friends.

Now Jewitt has 801,000 Instagram followers, and mostly promotes good
causes. These posts aren’t popular. “When I post about the things I care
about, I lose close to a thousand followers,” he says. So far he has lost
around 20,000 since his peak after Love Island, and has come to take a
strange pleasure in the process. “I wouldn’t want it any other way,” he says,
“because I want the people who follow me to know who I am, and like who
I am. I’m trying to depict a more real version of myself.”

Social media is bewitching because there’s time to lie, not like in real life.
The opportunity for positive attention is enormous, but accuracy is the
price. “When you present a curated version of yourself to the world, any
approval that you get is not for your full and whole self,” MacDonald says.
As Jewitt found out, this corrodes your feeling of belonging.

We don’t know yet whether social media makes people lonely. Even if it
does, we should remember that it is also useful to keep real friendships
going. But an MHF survey last month found that 30% of young Scots say
social media makes them feel isolated. The 2015 Pisa schools report showed
a dramatic fall across the developed world since 2012 in the number of
children who would say that “I make friends easily at school”. By a small
margin, those who use the internet the most were also most likely (17%) to
say that they felt lonely – although we don’t know which was causing
which, if either. We also don’t know how much of their time online was
spent on social media.

Even if offline time is good for you, it can be stressful, which might make
people hide behind their screens. “I always say to my students,”
MacDonald says, “‘If only in real life we had a backspace button.’ But no.
Once you say something, it’s out there. You don’t get that kind of control.”
Until recently, in other words, most of us were simply too socially clumsy
to avoid being ourselves.

Illustration: Nishant
Choksi
For some people, usually those who had a hard time growing up, this stress
can be unbearable. A fixed belief that you aren’t worth liking creates a
loneliness and craving for attention that they struggle to satisfy. If
desperate enough, they may even force other people to notice them,
preferring to be hated than ignored. These people are unhappy, and can be
dangerous. They commit crimes of attention.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of stalker. “One is the intimacy-
seeking stalker,” says Dr Brian Spitzberg, a leading authority on stalking
behaviour at San Diego State University. “They are trying to get back to a
person who has rejected them in some way.” Often these people used to be
in a relationship with their victim, the end of which they cannot accept.
“They are enveloped by the sense that this is the right person for them.
They feel injured and rejected … but underlying that is a desire for the
attention they think they deserve.”

The other type he calls “public figure stalkers”, who usually do not know
their victim personally, but pester them in order to achieve a goal of some
kind. “There is something they want done that they perceive public figures
aren’t doing,” Spitzberg says. “Some of them simply want someone in an
authoritative position to pay attention to their voice.”

Loneliness is common among stalkers. (One of them narrates my novel, for

which this article is in part a bid for attention.) However, attention is not
often considered to be their motive. What a stalker wants seems obvious:
to be part of their victim’s life. Their behaviour is irrational; it only makes
the victim reject them even more, but the stalker either insists that the
woman (about three-quarters of the time) will change her mind, or persists
in a spirit of revenge. And he does become part of the victim’s life, of
course. A big part.

After a firm rejection, the approach most experts recommend is to ignore

the stalker. They work on the basis, as Spitzberg puts it, that “any kind of
attention is still attention”. With this in mind, stalking behaviour seems
half-rational in someone who is desperate for a feeling of belonging.
Certainly most stalkers are not mentally ill in a way that a psychiatrist
would recognise. According to Spitzberg, only 30-50% of all stalkings that
become criminal cases can be traced to some kind of diagnosable disorder.
Among intimacy-seeking stalkers, it’s even less. “Most intimacy-seeking
stalking is something that almost anyone is capable of,” Spitzberg says, “if
they meet the wrong person under the wrong circumstances.”

Sadly, some people feel not just ignored by their ex, but ostracised by the
whole world. For them, life with almost no attention is sheer torture. A
recent workplace study in Canada found that ostracism was worse than the
negative attention of being bullied. The work of Professor Kip Williams at
Purdue University in Indiana shows how ostracism causes pain, and can
lead to antisocial behaviour. Another Mark Leary study shows it is a key
factor in school shootings.

Like stalking, this is a crime that seems utterly irrational. Usually it suffices
to say that the killer was angry, perhaps just insane. They are always lonely.
Spree killers are fond of leaving documents that explain their feelings.
Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech, 2007) claimed he was bullied, which baffled
those who knew him. Elliot Rodger (Isla Vista, 2014): “I felt depressed
because I wanted sex yet I felt unworthy of it”. Often a grotesque spirit of
belonging exists between them. Vester Flanagan (Moneta, 2015) was a fan
of Cho (“That’s my boy, right there”). Matti Junahi Saari (Kauhajoki, 2008)
and Pekka-Eric Auvinen (Jokela High School, 2007) swapped videos on
YouTube. Auvinen quoted the manifesto of “the martyrs Dylan [Klebold]
and Eric [Harris]” (Columbine, 1999), who also inspired Todd Cameron-
Smith (Alberta, 1999), Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook, 2012) and everyone else.
Needless to say, if they hadn’t killed anyone, we would have paid less
attention to their feelings.

There was a time when spree killing almost did not exist. Guns existed. So
did bombs and knives and vans. So did violent and disturbed people.
Indeed the world is now generally less violent than it used to be. Yet spree
killings grow more frequent. A study at the Harvard School of Public Health
found that mass shootings in the US in which at least four people died
occurred, on average, once every 200 days between 1982 and 2011. Then
once every 64 days between 2011 and 2014. Eighteen of the 30 deadliest
mass shootings in the US since 1949 have occurred in the past 10 years,
including all of the worst five.

What else can we call these but crimes of attention, made possible by new
media? Filmed on camcorders, then on phones. Seen live around the
world. Stored on Wikipedia and YouTube for posterity. Where would you
have found a copy of a killer’s manifesto in 1990, let alone a video? The
truth is that if you want the world’s attention badly enough, you can have it
tomorrow. It is easy. Before the internet, it was not.

Jihadists love to leave speeches too, but theirs

claim grander motives. Their killing sprees, they say, are part of a plan to
reach paradise and bring about the triumph of their beliefs. Yet many of
them hardly live with the piety they die for. Shehzad Tanweer, one of the
London tube bombers, had a secret girlfriend. Amedy Coulibaly, who
attacked the kosher supermarket in Paris, kept paedophile material on his
computer. According to Demos interviews with 62 former jihadists in 2010,
they “had a simpler, shallower conception of Islam than [nonviolent]
radicals”. Does it seem likely that they were forced into violence by their
devotion to scripture? Or is it more plausible that their violence, which
obsesses the world, feeds a craving for attention that they clothe in phoney
zealotry?

It is hard to imagine crimes of attention disappearing, but admitting that’s

what they are should help. Perhaps then we’ll stop rewarding criminal
behaviour with so much of the attention that it seeks. There are other
simple solutions to our attention crisis. Ideas like the Big Lunch, or the
MHF’s “Tea and Talk” events may improve access to high-quality attention
by helping people get to know each other better. Eventually the moment
may come when we are officially urged to get a minimum dose of offline
conversation every week, like exercise or our five-a-day. When we talk
more freely about our attention-seeking, maybe then at last we’ll get the
attention we need.

Consent by Leo Benedictus is published by Faber & Faber (£12.99). To order

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Topics
Mental health
Health / Psychology / features

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comments Order by Oldest Threads Collapsed 1 2 3 4 …

B833E
Sign in or create Iconoclastius 5 Feb 2018 13:40 85
your Guardian
And the people who developed and sold "social media" platforms and apps knew they
account to join
were addictive, and had intended that they be addictive. The sale of what ultimately
the discussion.
resembles misery is akin to what big tobacco sold us. When will they be held to account?

Share Report

Guardian_Account____ Iconoclastius 5 Feb 2018 15:00 20

That’s a faulty comparison. Social media in the right hands is a powerful tool for
human endeavour. For example, I’ve probably learned more on Wikipedia than I
ever did in any so-called school,

Share Report

User752810 Guardian_Account____ 5 Feb 2018 15:24 90

so called? was it not a school?

Share Report

Show 22 more replies

Truewordshere 5 Feb 2018 13:50 43

It is hard to imagine crimes of attention disappearing, but admitting that’s what

they are should help.

Aah, so spree killers and jihadists just want some attention. Poor things.

Share Report

straymutt Truewordshere 5 Feb 2018 14:45 33

Yep, nothing to do with psychotic religious indoctrinations and brain-washing.

They kill, maim, and blow themselves - and innocent bystanders - up cos they
really want a group hug.
Now you know, hey?

Share Report

Truewordshere straymutt 5 Feb 2018 14:53 11

Yes, indeed, the religious connection is just a red herring invented by the usual
suspects as it is

more plausible that their violence, which obsesses the world, feeds a
craving for attention

Share Report

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