Knowing what to overlook

06 Mar, 2026

A ☕️☕️☕️ essay in seven parts.

I.

It was an ordinary Tuesday evening in October, the kind that arrives in the middle of a season before you've finished adjusting to it. One daughter at soccer practice. The other three kids running around on the open field nearby with a loose energy that falls somewhere between play and negotiation. I was on the sideline, present enough to count heads, far enough away to let them be.

I try not to hover. This isn't something I have to work at particularly hard—I'm a hang-back sort of person by nature, and that carries over into fatherhood. I want to know where they are. I feel the pull of protection the way any parent does. But stepping in before something has declared itself, organizing their experience before they've had a chance to inhabit it—that has never been my instinct. I'd rather be available than present in a way that crowds them.

I noticed the two older boys when they came over. I couldn't hear what was being said, but I could read the shape of it—the slight shift in posture, the way the younger kids' body language changed. Something was happening that wasn't ordinary roughhousing. I held still. I told myself I'd wait.

Before long they came back across the field to find me. The older boys had been using profanity, threatening them, making themselves as large and frightening as they could manage. One of them had picked up their ball and thrown it as far as he could, the way you do when you want someone to know you can take things from them.

My son and his sister had told them, calmly, that it wasn't okay.

What struck me—then and afterward, turning it over—was the calm. Not just that they had stood up for themselves, which mattered, but the way they had done it. They hadn't matched the volume. They hadn't escalated. They had named what was wrong and then come to find me, and by the time they got to me they were mostly just ready to point out where the boys had gone, mildly interested, already returned to themselves. They were, as far as I could tell, okay.

I told them I was proud of them for calmly standing up for what was right. I meant it. But I also found myself sitting with a question I didn't immediately know how to answer, and it was aimed most precisely at my son: what exactly had just held? Some disposition, some small formation of character had been tested in a minor but real way, and it had held. Where did it come from? How does a father participate in building something like that in a boy without quite knowing he's doing it—and without hovering over it so closely that it never gets the chance to become its own?

I don't think this is only a parenting question, though it is that. I think it is a question about what we are forming our sons toward, and whether the account of the good we are handing them is strong enough to hold when the world tries to make cruelty feel inevitable and cynicism feel like wisdom.

II.

There is a particular pose that has become almost ambient in educated online life—a kind of knowing detachment, a willingness to name what's broken without any corresponding investment in what might be better. It shows up in the reflexive irony that greets any sincere assertion. It shows up in comment sections and reply threads where the sophistication of the critique is inversely proportional to any apparent interest in repair. It shows up in the political imagination of people across the spectrum who have become so fluent in what they're against that the question of what they're for has quietly stopped feeling urgent.

Matthew Desmond, in conversation with Ezra Klein, called this chic nihilism—and the word chic is doing important work in that phrase. This is not the nihilism of despair, not the bleak conclusion of someone who has looked long and hard at suffering and found no ground beneath it. It is nihilism as aesthetic, as social performance, as a way of signaling that you are too clear-eyed to be caught hoping for anything. It is, in a specific and uncomfortable way, a form of cowardice dressed as sophistication.¹

Trolling is its cruder cousin, and they share a common mechanism. The troll and the chic nihilist are both, at root, practicing a strategy of attention-capture. The troll makes himself the organizing center of your interior life through provocation—the thrown ball, the escalating threat, the cruelty calibrated to produce a reaction. The nihilist does something subtler: he makes cynicism so ambient, so apparently inevitable, that your own impulse toward hope or repair begins to feel naive, embarrassing, insufficiently serious. Both are asking you to be organized around their terms. Both are offering you, underneath the surface noise, an invitation to stop seeing clearly and start reacting instead.

What I want for my son is immunity to both invitations. Not ignorance of what's broken—he will see plenty of what's broken, and I don't want to protect him from that seeing. Not a reflexive optimism that can't survive contact with reality. Something harder and quieter than either: the capacity to look at what is actually there, including the cruelty and the disappointment, and remain oriented toward something worth being oriented toward.

That is a formation question. And it begins, I think, with attention.

III.

The opposite of chic nihilism is not enthusiasm. It is not positivity, and it is not the performance of hope. It is something more disciplined and less comfortable than any of those: the capacity to direct your attention deliberately, to choose what you will allow to organize your interior life, to resist the pull of whatever is loudest in favor of what is actually worth seeing.

William James put it with a compression that has stayed with me. As the art of reading, after a certain stage in one's education, is the art of skipping—so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The analogy to reading is not ornamental. James is saying that maturity, in any discipline, involves learning to move through a field selectively rather than exhaustively—that the person who tries to give equal attention to everything is not more thorough but less capable, because genuine comprehension requires triage. Wisdom, on this account, is not the accumulation of more but the discipline of less: knowing what to let go in order to hold what actually matters. The line is easy to misread as a permission slip for looking away from what is difficult. It is the opposite. James was describing a discipline—the recognition that attention is finite, that you cannot give yourself fully to everything that bids for your focus, and that wisdom consists precisely in the discernment of what deserves the gift of your presence.²

Simone Weil spent more of her thinking life on this question than almost any philosopher of the twentieth century, and what she concluded is stranger and more demanding than it first appears. Attention, in Weil's account, is not concentration. It is not effort or will or the forceful direction of mental energy toward an object. It is closer to the opposite of all those things—a kind of self-emptying, a receptive waiting, a clearing of yourself so that what is actually there can enter. She describes it as the suspension of your own thoughts, your own needs, your own categories, so that the other person—or the problem, or the situation—can be received on its own terms rather than yours. This is why she calls it the rarest and purest form of generosity. Most of what passes for attention is actually projection. We look at people through the screen of our own interior weather and receive back, largely, ourselves. Genuine attention—the kind Weil means—requires that you get out of the way.³

The implications of this for how we think about cruelty are significant. The troll is not simply inattentive. He is aggressively projective—he does not see you at all. He sees a surface that will produce the reaction he is after, and his cruelty is calibrated to that end. What he wants is not encounter but response, not your actual presence but your reorganization around him. The person formed in Weil's sense is not simply more polite than the troll. They are operating from a fundamentally different orientation—one that takes the reality of the other seriously enough to actually look, which is precisely what the troll's entire strategy is designed to prevent.

The Desert Fathers had a word for the practice Weil is describing: prosoche—watchful attention, the discipline of noticing what is actually present rather than being swept along by whatever is reactive in you. Its opposite in the patristic vocabulary was not inattention but distraction—a word they used with moral gravity, because they understood that a distracted person is not simply unfocused but vulnerable, available to be organized by whatever ambient force is strongest. Formation, in their account, was largely a matter of training the attention: learning to see clearly, to notice accurately, to resist the pull of whatever was clamoring loudest in favor of what was genuinely there.⁴

Václav Havel, writing from within a very different tradition and a very different kind of danger, arrived at something that rhymes with both of them. What the communist system required of ordinary citizens, Havel observed, was not genuine belief. It was performance. The greengrocer puts the sign in the window—Workers of the World, Unite!—not because he means it but because everyone puts signs in the window, and the performance of allegiance is what the system runs on. It is easier to comply than to refuse, and the compliance does not even ask you to actually see anything. It asks only that you go through the motions, that you be present in body while absent in attention. Living in truth, the alternative Havel keeps returning to, is not primarily an intellectual act. It is a dispositional one—the refusal to perform what you cannot actually see. It requires, before anything else, the capacity and the willingness to look at what is actually there.⁵

My son, on an October evening, did something that looked a great deal like this. He saw what was happening. He named it without escalating it. He did not let two loud, threatening boys become the organizing center of his response—did not perform either compliance or matching cruelty. He stayed, somehow, himself.

I want to understand how that happened. More than that, I want to understand how to keep cultivating it.

IV.

There is a version of the concern I'm describing that gets mistaken for a political argument. What I am after for my son is not that he arrives at the right opinions. It is not that he lands on the correct side of the debates that will define his adult life, whatever those turn out to be. It is something prior to all of that—a disposition of careful seeing that would make his eventual conclusions genuinely his own rather than the product of whatever team got to him first.

The reflexive partisan and the chic nihilist look like opposites. One is loudly committed; the other performs detachment. But they share a common failure: neither is really looking. The reflexive partisan has outsourced his attention to an apparatus that tells him what to see before he's seen it. The nihilist has exempted himself from the obligation to see at all. Both are ways of avoiding the harder and more demanding work of attending to what is actually in front of you—the particular situation, the specific person, the claim that doesn't fit neatly into the available categories.

Havel's greengrocer, who we met in the last section, is worth staying with a moment longer. What makes his situation so uncomfortable to read about is how reasonable the compliance seems. The sign costs him nothing. Everyone has one. The system doesn't ask him to believe anything—only to perform, which is a much lower bar. And yet Havel's argument is that the performance is precisely the problem, because it habituates the greengrocer to a particular relationship with reality: one in which what you publicly enact and what you actually see are permitted to diverge, in which the gap between appearance and truth becomes something you simply live with. The person who has practiced that habituation long enough loses, gradually, the ability to close the gap—loses, finally, the felt sense that the gap matters. Living in truth is the refusal to begin that habituation, which means it has to start early, before the compromises accumulate into a settled way of being in the world. It is, among other things, a formation project.⁶

Marilynne Robinson has been making a version of this argument from within the American context for decades, in essays that resist capture by any available political faction with a consistency that has made her variously beloved and maddening across the spectrum. What she keeps returning to is the impoverishment of a civic imagination that has forgotten how to be genuinely curious about its fellow citizens—that has replaced the hard work of actually seeing the people around you with the much easier work of sorting them into categories that confirm what you already believed. The loss she is diagnosing is not primarily political. It is attentional. We have stopped looking at each other, and we have stopped noticing that we've stopped.⁷

The virtue tradition has a name for the capacity both Havel and Robinson are pointing toward: prudence. Not caution in the colloquial sense, but the master virtue that Aquinas understood as the one that makes all the others functional. Prudence is the capacity to perceive a situation accurately before acting—to see what is actually there rather than what your fear or your ideology needs to be there. Courage without prudence is recklessness. Kindness without prudence is sentimentality. The prudent person sees first, then responds, and because they have seen clearly, their response has a chance of being genuinely adequate to the situation rather than merely reactive.⁸

My son, when those boys came across the field with their profanity and their menace, did something prudent in exactly this sense. He read the situation accurately. He responded to what was actually happening rather than to what the boys were trying to make happen. He did not become a function of their cruelty, did not put the sign in the window. That is not a small thing. In a cultural moment that is constantly generating invitations to react, to perform, to be organized by whatever is loudest—that kind of careful seeing is increasingly countercultural.

It is also the beginning of genuine political formation. Not the installation of correct opinions, but the cultivation of a person who can actually look.

V.

Kindness is not the same thing as niceness, and the difference matters more than it might initially appear. Niceness is essentially social—a performance of warmth and accommodation calibrated to the expectations of the people around you. It is not nothing, but it is fragile. It depends on a cooperative environment, on the other party meeting you somewhere close to halfway, on the absence of serious provocation. The bully shatters niceness almost by design, because niceness has no interior architecture to hold against pressure. It is a surface, and surfaces yield.

What my son demonstrated on that soccer field was not niceness. He was not accommodating, not trying to smooth things over, not performing warmth toward boys who were threatening him. He named what was wrong and declined to be moved. That requires something with more structure to it—a disposition that doesn't depend on the other party's cooperation because it isn't primarily about the other party at all. It is about who you have become settled enough to be.

Ross Gay has been thinking about this, in his own idiom, for years—though he would probably not frame it in the virtue tradition's terms, and the translation is worth attempting carefully rather than too quickly. Gay's project in The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is sometimes received as a celebration of small pleasures, a kind of literary optimism, which is a significant misreading. What Gay is actually doing is more demanding than that: he is arguing that the practice of noticing what is good—really noticing it, attending to it with the full seriousness it deserves—is an act of resistance rather than an escape from difficulty. Delight, in Gay's account, is not the absence of sorrow. It is what becomes possible when you are present enough to what is actually there to receive it, sorrow included. The two are not opposites. They are, at their roots, the same kind of attention turned toward different aspects of the same real world.⁹

This is why Gay's tenderness never reads as soft, even when it is gentle. It is the tenderness of someone who has looked at what is actually there and chosen, with full awareness of the alternatives, to stay open to it. That requires courage in a specific sense—not the courage of confrontation but the courage of vulnerability, the willingness to be genuinely affected by what you encounter rather than armoring yourself against it. The armor is always available. The troll has put it on. The nihilist has put it on in a different way. Gay's argument, enacted more than stated, is that the armor costs you the very thing that makes life worth the trouble of living.¹⁰

Kindness, understood this way, is the visible form of formed attention. It is what Weil's receptive waiting looks like when it meets another person—the willingness to receive them as they actually are, which is both more and less than what you might have preferred them to be. It is what Gay's practiced delight looks like when it is turned not toward a fig tree or a pickup basketball game but toward the specific, difficult, irreducible human being in front of you. It is not a feeling. It is a practice, which means it can be cultivated, strengthened, handed on.

It can also be tested—and what the test reveals is whether there is anything genuinely there or only the performance of it. Two older boys with profanity and a thrown ball are a minor test, as tests go. But minor tests are where formation either declares itself or doesn't, and what declared itself that evening was something with enough interior structure to hold. My son was kind in the serious sense—not accommodating, not performing, not armored either. He saw what was happening, named it, and remained himself.

That is the thing I am trying to understand how to cultivate. And I am increasingly convinced that you cannot cultivate it directly, cannot install it through instruction or lecture or the repeated assertion of correct values. It grows, if it grows, from something prior—from a practiced orientation toward the world that has been modeled and inhabited long enough to become, finally, the shape of a life.

VI.

There is a paradox at the center of this kind of formation, and I have been circling it since that October evening without quite naming it directly. The paradox is this: the things I most want to cultivate in my son cannot be cultivated by direct application. You cannot install careful seeing through a curriculum. You cannot produce settled kindness through instruction. You cannot lecture a boy into the disposition that held on that soccer field, and if you could, it would not be the same disposition—it would be performance, which is precisely what we have been arguing against.

What you can do, I think, is be a certain kind of person in his presence. Consistently, over a long time, without too much commentary on what you're doing.

Oliver Burkeman's argument in Four Thousand Weeks—a book whose cheering title conceals a fairly demanding set of conclusions—is that meaningful attention is only possible when you accept its fundamental finitude. You will not attend to everything. You cannot. The attempt to keep all options open, to remain available to every claim on your time and presence, is not a form of abundance but of flight—a way of avoiding the commitment that genuine presence requires. To actually be somewhere, with someone, you have to accept that you are not somewhere else, with someone else, and that this is not a failure of efficiency but the basic structure of a finite human life. Meaning accumulates in the particular, not in the attempt to remain perpetually available to everything.¹¹

This lands differently when you apply it to fatherhood. The father who is always elsewhere—not physically absent, necessarily, but distributed, dispersed across a dozen ambient anxieties and digital obligations—is not simply failing to be present. He is modeling a relationship with attention that his son will absorb and practice and eventually inhabit as his own. Children do not learn what we tell them about attention. They learn what they watch us actually do with ours.

I am a hang-back sort of person, and this has served my son in ways I could not have designed. Not hovering means there is space between us—space in which he has had to become, gradually, more himself. But hang-back is not the same as absent, and the distinction matters. What I am trying to practice—imperfectly, with regular failures—is something closer to what Weil means by attention than to what our cultural moment means by presence. Not the performance of involvement, not the anxious monitoring that mistakes surveillance for love, but a quality of actual receptivity: available without organizing, watchful without controlling, near enough that he knows I am there and far enough that he has room to discover what he is made of.

The evening at the soccer field was a small illustration of this. I noticed something was wrong. I waited. Not because I was suppressing a powerful urge to intervene—that is not quite my nature—but because waiting was simply the right thing, and I knew it, and I trusted something that had been building between us long enough that I believed it might hold. It held.

What I said afterward mattered. I did not debrief the tactics. I did not explain what they had done well or suggest refinements for next time or offer a pedagogical framework for conflict resolution. I said: I am proud of you for calmly standing up for what was right. One sentence. Then I let it be enough.

That restraint was its own small practice of the thing I am trying to describe. Formation does not require constant commentary. It does not need to explain itself at every turn. Sometimes the most formative thing a father can do is name what is true and trust the child to carry it.

VII.

I keep returning to that evening, and I think I finally understand why. It isn't because anything dramatic happened—in the register of things that actually happen to children, two older boys with bad language and a thrown ball barely registers. What I keep returning to is the calm. The specific quality of my son's presence in a moment that was designed, by the boys on the other side of the field, to produce something other than calm.

He did not perform toughness. He did not perform indifference. He did not armor himself or escalate or comply. He saw what was happening, named it, and came back across the field to find me essentially himself—a little indignant, a little interested in pointing out where the boys had gone, and then, within minutes, returned to whatever mattered to him before the interruption. The interruption had not reorganized him. The cruelty had not found purchase.

I do not entirely know how that happened. That is the sentence I keep coming back to, and I think the not-knowing is actually important to sit with rather than explain away. Formation is not a technology. You cannot reverse-engineer a disposition from a single data point and produce a reliable method. What I can say is that something has been accumulating—in the particular texture of our life together, in the quality of attention we have tried to practice toward him and that he has, in his own way, begun to practice toward the world, in the ten years of ordinary days that preceded that Tuesday evening in October and that were, apparently, doing something.

This is what Ross Gay means, I think, when he argues that delight is a practice rather than a mood—that it requires cultivation, repetition, the patient formation of a self that knows how to receive what is actually there. The boy who comes back across the field essentially himself has been practicing something, even if neither of us has called it that. He has been learning, slowly, where to put his attention. He has been learning what is worth seeing and what can be overlooked. He has been learning, in the specific idiom of a ten-year-old's life, the art that William James compressed into a single sentence.

The world will keep generating invitations to be organized by its cruelty, its cynicism, its endless production of reasons why hope is naive and care is weakness and the whole thing is probably not worth the effort of genuine attention. Some of those invitations will be more sophisticated than two boys with profanity and a thrown ball. Some of them will be harder to name and harder to refuse. My son will face versions of them I cannot anticipate, in circumstances I cannot prepare him for, and he will face them without me standing on the other side of the field.

What I am trying to give him, underneath everything else, is a self settled enough to remain itself under that pressure. A self that has somewhere better to put its attention. A self that has practiced, long enough and in enough ordinary moments, the discipline of actually seeing—and that has found, in that seeing, something worth the gift of a life's attention.

I am not finished learning how to do this. I suspect that is also part of what I am trying to teach him.

Bibliography

Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Desmond, Matthew. Interview by Ezra Klein. "The Ezra Klein Show." New York Times, April 21, 2023. Transcript. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-matthew-desmond.html.

Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer. Translated by John Eudes Bamberger. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981.

Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2019.

———. Inciting Joy: Essays. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2022.

Havel, Václav. "The Power of the Powerless." In The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, translated by Paul Wilson, 23–96. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985.

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt, 1890.

Robinson, Marilynne. When I Was a Child I Read Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

———. What Are We Doing Here?: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros., 1947.

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Crawford. New York: Putnam, 1951.

———. Letter to Joë Bousquet, April 13, 1942. In Simone Weil: A Life, by Simone Pétrement, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon, 1976.

Footnotes

#attention #character #fatherhood #habit #kindness #masculine formation #nihilism #political formation #virtue ethics