Find Your God: How Simone Weil Might Help Us Build Attention in the Age of Tech
Weil saved my education, and hopefully, can do the same for others.
My teens were a rough few years. I had existential crises about my existential crises. Who was I, did I matter, did my choices matter, and most relevantly, what was the point of all this learning?
Priten’s Early Existential Crises
Throughout high school and the following gap year, I was a literal card-carrying member of the American Atheist Society, having shed my religious beliefs during middle school (a later essay topic).
I spent those years with two aims 1) to grow my nonprofit as a way to immediately give back and 2) to position myself in the best possible way to make an impact in neuroscience. These two aims provided me the grounding at that point to make the most of my microcosmic time on earth.
My senior year, I decided to take a gap year to take time before I got back into the grind of schooling. I spent part of it in South Korea, and during that time, I learned a few things about myself that the rushed myopia of high school had not allowed me to confront. First, I realized I didn’t really know why I was so committed to those two exact aims. An education nonprofit and a career in neuroscience didn’t really reconcile into a life plan. And, second, the emptiness of having finished the college admissions process, not being in school, and living alone for the first time opened up the room for a lot more self-reflection about who I wanted to be, or rather who I should be; and I had no clue.
In doing so, I found myself exploring my religious identity again. It started with attending meditation sessions at the local Buddhist temple, reading Mahatma Gandhi’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and noticing that something about there being a greater power and the love and hope that brought out, felt like the missing piece. Slowly, I felt something resonate with what felt right for a living philosophy.
Even More Crises
Fast forwarding a few months, I showed up to college newly interested in exploring religious philosophy and wanting to form a world view that was both coherent and would shape what was next for me. In doing so, I became fixated on the power of religious belief, the idea of “some” higher power, and the role that I wanted that to play in my life.
Reading everything from works by the Dalai Lama and Swami Vivekananda to medieval Hindi poetry reinforced the idea of devoting life to some higher power.
But then, I wondered, why take Expository Writing 20 and try to fulfill my Empirical Reasoning General Ed Requirement?
This struggle was reflective of a larger problem I was facing. The mundane nature of schooling, the disconnect from my faith and values, and the lost time spent in non-devotional activities felt burdensome, if not down right torturous.
When I shared my dilemma with my Sanskrit professor, Parimal Patil, he in his characteristically soft-handed approach, directed me to an essay by an early 20th century French philosopher that started, “The key to a Christian conception of studies is…” 1
That’s right. My Sanskrit professor sent me, a student struggling with how to reconcile Hinduism with secular existence, an essay about Christian schooling. Expecting some plot twist, I dug into the essay and slowly understood why Professor Patil had sent me the article.
Weil On the Point of Education
Weil argued that the ultimate point of studies was to increase the capacity for prayer no matter how tangential to our interests.
The first reason, she argued, was to build our capacity for attention. Not attention as Silicon Valley defines it, time-on-site, engagement metrics, eyeballs captured. Weil was talking about something much deeper.
She argued that all time spent developing the ability to learn, grapple with a problem, and devote oneself to studies, helped develop the same dispositions that were required for meaningful and pure prayer towards God.
She made clear that it wasn’t even all that important whether we succeeded at every task:
“If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.”
The skills that were built by learning to push through, build focus, and hold attention would help later in ensuring that prayer was focused and undisturbed.
The second skillset was the ability to recognize our own faults. She argued that instead of trying to find reasons we were right when we were corrected by our teachers, we ought to honestly reflect on what we could have done better.
She explained (quite bluntly):
“When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence.”
Thus, if students saw schooling as building capacity for attention and becoming humble, it did not matter what they were learning or whether it was their “favorite subject.” All schooling pushed us towards this higher purpose.
The argument as Weil wrote it resonated with 19-year old Priten, and still resonates with me over a decade later. And while religion plays a much different role in my life today than it did during my young adulthood, I still find the idea of boring and mundane tasks to be a way to develop a capacity that can help me in my prayer (another later essay topic). And so, Weil’s essay still sits on my desktop and grounds me when I find myself asking: what really is the point of doing this?
Weil was writing about Christian schooling in mid-century France, but her diagnosis feels prophetic when applied to education today.
Education’s Attention Crisis
One constant topic of conversation in education is student attention.2 How can we capture it? How do we hold on to it? Could we gamify our way into keeping young people engaged?
Especially post-pandemic, educators face absenteeism, disengagement, and what feels like a generation with the shortest of short attention spans.3
In response, there are calls to make learning more entertaining. Points, badges, leaderboards. Bite-sized content. Novelty.4
Or! We should make sure that everything we teach is perfectly aligned with our students’ interests and personalize it to something that will help hold their attention.
Or! Let’s become stricter with our grading and penalize students who don’t spend the right amount of time on school work!5
These are understandable, but short-sighted responses. Weil would identify the shortcomings immediately: engagement is not attention. Enjoyment is not patience. Presence is not effort. Keeping students occupied is not the same as helping them grow.
A student can be highly engaged while learning almost nothing. Meanwhile, the struggling student who sits with a difficult problem, who wrestles with something she does not understand, who feels the frustration of incomprehension and does not look away, that student is growing, even if she never solves the problem.
As new technology is being built and new pedagogical strategies being suggested, I worry that the rush to cater to the shorter attentions spans is going to cause us to lose something precious.6
The mantra7 of efficiency in education seems to point to reducing more and more friction that requires the kind of attention that Weil speaks of. AI that makes your flashcards for you, tools that personalize everything to your interests, and assignments that have to be “fun” and “entertaining” — these are all things that will push our students further away from ever getting the chance to build that skillset.
And, while most of my work focuses on education, this crisis isn’t unique to our students. Adults across the board are reading less books, spending more time on short-form media conception, and generally losing the ability to be present and engaged for sustained periods of time.8
Finding Your God
Simone Weil is clearly writing to a religious audience. So, should we care about this crisis if we are not concerned with Christian prayer? I think the answer is a resounding: Yes!
Her insight extends beyond any particular faith or faith itself. She ends the essay with this (emphasis my own):
“For an adolescent, capable of grasping this truth and generous enough to desire this fruit above all others, studies could have their fullest spiritual effect, quite apart from any particular religious belief.
Academic work is one of those fields containing a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.”
We need not want to cultivate that type of deep presence, humility, and focus for religious prayer, but research across historical analyses and psychological experiments shows that sustained, deep, focus makes life more enriching, fulfilling, and meaningful.
The beauty of working on a monument to faith across generations in a collective act of humanity, the joy of reading a a novel that allows you to combine the world of another’s creation and your own imagination, the ability to truly listen when you another person is telling you about their struggles — these are all activities that require a type of presence that we seem to be moving away from.9
And Weil herself points one of those uses of this disposition, empathy:
Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.
She recognizes that the same depth that prayer requires is what loving another human requires. If we cannot push past the urge to talk about our own problems, suggest solutions, or dismiss concerns, the depth of our relationships will never reach the level of recognition that Weil speaks of.
Today, we might call this grit, empathy or “flow state”, but that only names this disposition, we still have to answer from whence might that come?
Maybe, it’s in naming our gods.
So, I’d like you to reflect on what your god is. It might be the divine as traditionally understood. But it might also be truth itself. It might be justice, or beauty, or the suffering face of another person. It might be your child, your parent, or your partner. Whatever it is, think about whether it can solely be obtained through bite-sized, barely present interactions.
Praying to any of these “gods” demands your full presence. Whatever it is, you cannot reach it while distracted. You cannot love it while multitasking. You cannot serve it while optimizing for efficiency.
What Our Students Need
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ethics of educational technology lately (obligatory link to pre-ordering Ethical Ed Tech), and so Weil’s essay echoes even more in my head because it names something that we seem to be increasingly giving up on.
As I did my interviews with faculty and students, looked at the latest marketing from ed tech companies, and read the solutions being proposed by others, I found a general lack of focus on attention. Even when people acknowledged the crisis, the solutions were about working around it.
Now, partially this is because this is not a problem that one educator can fix on their own. This is a systematic problem that requires the collective effort of parents, educators, and the children themselves, but however daunting, I hope we can fight for this together, rather than accept defeat.
To be clear, Weil was not advocating for suffering or boredom as virtues in themselves. She understood that intelligence only grows in joy. “Where it is lacking,” she wrote, “there are no real students.”
But joy is different from entertainment. Joy comes from the encounter with something real, something true, something that exceeds us. It comes from the struggle and the breakthrough.
“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”
This is the opposite of how we train students today. We train them to search, to prompt, to demand instant results. We design systems that reward activity and speed and penalize stillness and struggle.
I want us to ask: How do we help students develop the capacity for sustained attention to something outside themselves? How do we help students cultivate the patience to wait upon truth, rather than grasping for it immediately? How do we prepare students to love with depth, rather than performance?
A Collective Challenge
Next time you are having a conversation with a child about their education, instead of asking them about their favorite subject, see if you can provoke them to think of their “god.” At the least, hopefully you can set them on their journey to do so, at best, they learn to name it and act towards it.
Hopefully, it’s one drop in a bucket of helping children discover what makes a genuine claim on their attention, what calls them to give themselves fully, what deserves their presence. And, then let every exercise of attention, even the boring ones, even the frustrating ones, especially the failed ones, become practice for that encounter.
This is what school is actually for.
https://www.themathesontrust.org/papers/christianity/Weil-Reflections.pdf (n.b. that at one point, Weil uses a master/slave analogy in her original essay, drawing from Luke 17:7-10 and the analogy therein.)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/12/among-many-u-s-children-reading-for-fun-has-become-less-common-federal-data-shows
https://www.ed.gov/teaching-and-administration/supporting-students/chronic-absenteeism
Sailer, M., Homner, L. The Gamification of Learning: a Meta-analysis. Educ Psychol Rev 32, 77–112 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09498-w
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/us/harvard-students-absenteeism.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/opinion/read-books-learning.html, https://apnews.com/article/books-reading-high-school-english-class-c8d9f39773268a6e8c79cb0b3c78d3c1
Pun Fully Intended
https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/20/reading-for-pleasure-study
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/20/flow-state-science-creativity-psychology-focus, https://www.travel-ancient-world-sites.com/Historical-Timeline.html