On some mornings, I sit with a cup of coffee on my terrace and watch the city come awake. The lake is usually calm at sunrise, a sheet of reflected light caught between the high-rises. I’ll often have a lecture open on my laptop—neuroscience, usually, or philosophy of mind. A notebook beside me, half-filled with lines about memory, or a softness I’m learning to name. I hover in that state where attention sharpens before it scatters.
And then a sound rises from the street below—a scream that makes my body react before my mind understands. Not anger, or fear. Something closer to a mind coming apart. Another voice answers. A metal bin crashes over. This is the daily language of lives lived in chemical fire at my doorstep.
A woman staggers towards the recycling container, her motions frantic. I don’t know her story—whether this is withdrawal, psychosis, exhaustion, all three. I don’t know if she’s been awake for days or if this is her first waking hour. What I do know is that whatever attention I imagine I’m giving to her reality is purchased from a position she doesn’t occupy. The recognition arrives with force: I get to sit here and theorise about attention. Whatever she’s doing right now, it isn’t that.
The shift inside me is immediate. Not guilt—recognition. Attention has a cost, and her nervous system has already paid it.
The Biology and Inequality of Reflection
We often treat self-understanding as a matter of discipline or sincerity, as though anyone willing to try hard enough can turn inward and see. But attention is not a neutral faculty. It is a state the body must be able to sustain—metabolically, hormonally, neurologically. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for analysis and perspective, is exquisitely sensitive to pressure. Chronic scarcity saturates the bloodstream with cortisol; sleep fragments; the sympathetic nervous system remains vigilant. Under such conditions, reflection becomes physiologically unlikely. You cannot examine your emotional history when your body is braced against the present. You cannot parse the origins of a pattern when the day demands all your cognitive resources just to continue.
Consider someone balancing two jobs, an immigration hearing, and a disabled parent. Their nervous system is in triage. The bandwidth required to ask, Why do I react this way? never appears—not because they lack insight, but because their biology has no surplus to allocate. In such lives, attention is diverted, not denied.
This dependence on biology and circumstance creates a kind of perceptual inequality that is rarely acknowledged but widely lived. A person raised in stable surroundings, free from chronic threat, with time and education to practise introspection, will naturally develop a richer capacity for self-examination than someone whose early years were marked by instability, violence, or scarcity. These differences compound over a lifetime, yet we often judge others—or ourselves—as though the capacity for introspection were evenly distributed. We urge people to “take responsibility,” “break their patterns,” “choose differently,” without recognising that the ability to perceive one’s patterns is unevenly available.
Insight is not merit. Awareness is not virtue. The capacity to reflect is a resource long before it becomes a choice. When we ignore this, we mistake deprivation for character.
Art as the Prosthesis of Attention
This is one reason art matters—perhaps more than our culture easily admits.
Art is not a decorative surplus to ordinary life. It is a mechanism by which attention is pooled and redistributed. A painter, a writer, a composer spends years training perception to grasp what would otherwise remain unarticulated. That attention, once distilled, becomes shareable. One person bears the biological and emotional cost of clarity, and thousands are granted access to its results.
Across traditions, thinkers have recognised this redistribution of perception. John Dewey saw art as a reorganisation of the senses, a way of teaching us to notice what ordinarily slips past. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, writing on painting, believed that a canvas reveals not the object but the seeing—perception turned inside-out. And James Baldwin argued that the artist must illuminate what others cannot bear or afford to face, offering clarity on behalf of those whose lives have no margin for it.
Art, in this sense, is a form of perceptual justice: it redistributes clarity across unequal lives.
It allows those without the surplus to borrow attention they could not afford to cultivate. It turns one person’s hard-won seeing into a public good.
Ethics and Freedom
Recognising attention as a biological and social privilege imposes a quiet obligation. Those who possess it—whether through temperament, training, or circumstance—are not elevated so much as entrusted with it. Clarity should soften judgement, not sharpen.
Once we understand how narrow the window for reflection can be—how easily it closes under fear, poverty, trauma, illness, or simple exhaustion—the moral calculus shifts. Condemnation becomes incoherent. Cruelty becomes lazy. The stories we impose on others (“they should know better,” “they chose this”) collapse under the weight of lived complexity.
What follows is not activism necessarily, but a change in how we interpret behaviour: we learn to pause before assigning motive, to allow for causes we cannot see. And within that shift lies a smaller, yet truer freedom.
We cannot choose our childhoods, our temperament, or the economic frame our lives unfold into, but we can choose to direct whatever attention we have. We can slow the jump from perception to conclusion. And we can extend to others the interpretive mercy we hope they’d extend to us.
Gestures That Linger
Later, as the morning warms, the woman by the bin gathers her things and moves on. Across the street, outside the former Rogers Media building—now an overcrowded, chronically underfunded shelter—a man pulls himself upright, eyes still caught between night and day. People emerge slowly from the doorway, each carrying whatever margin the city has left them. My notebook waits, but the insight I was reaching for has shifted.
I understand now that any moment of reflection I manage to claim rests on conditions that were not guaranteed, and that many around me simply do not have.
So I watch the lake catch a small wind. And, almost unconsciously, make a quiet decision: to spend some of my attention on seeing through another’s eyes.
Art, at its best, has always offered us a way to borrow another’s view, while holding their dignity steady when the world will not.