It is a Friday evening, in one of those restaurants you book weeks ahead. The tablecloths are linen, the bread arrives still warm, and the waiter knows which alpine pasture every cheese on the trolley comes from. At the next table sit two people who have plainly chosen the place and the evening with care: you can tell from the way they have dressed, from the way they have ordered. The first course arrives and, before tasting it, one of them photographs it. Then the phone stays on the table, face up, beside the glass. Every so often the screen lights up, and each time, for an instant, both of them look at it. Neither is doing anything wrong. It is simply that the dinner they planned so carefully is taking place a little to one side of where they are.
Anyone who has eaten out in recent years has seen a scene like this, and almost all of us, sooner or later, have been in it. It is worth looking at closely, because it holds a small paradox of our time. In that room everything has been done with attention: the choice of wine, the cooking, the light, even the pace at which the plates leave the kitchen. And it is precisely this attention, far more than the linen on the tables, that one pays for. Yet the one thing the restaurant cannot serve is the attention of the people sitting at the table.
What We Are Really Paying For
Luxury has always been a matter of rarity. For centuries what was rare was what came from far away: spices, silk, and purple dye, which cost a fortune because thousands of shellfish were needed to colour a single cloak. Later, when industrial production had made almost everything else abundant, what became rare was whatever demanded a great deal of work by hand. Today, in the part of the world where we live, objects are seldom scarce. Something else is, and you see it most clearly in the very places where luxury is sold.
Look at it patiently and what we call luxury turns out, almost always, to be attention made visible. A made-to-measure shirt is a shirt for which someone has studied our shoulders at length, and the way we move our arms. A great wine is the result of years in which someone watched the same vineyard, row by row, deciding when to wait and when to step in. A hotel feels luxurious not because of the marble in the lobby but because, on the second morning, somebody remembers how we take our coffee. What we pay for, in the end, is to find ourselves for a few hours at the centre of the attention of someone who knows their craft.
The idea is less obvious than it sounds. We are used to thinking of luxury as excess, as something beyond what is needed. But excess today is everywhere, and it is cheap. What continues to cost dearly is care, which is to say the time of a skilled person turned entirely towards a single thing. The price of a luxury object, when it is deserved, measures above all this.
The Watchmaker’s Bench
No object shows it better than a mechanical watch. In Switzerland we have known this for generations: in the valleys of the Jura there are still workshops where a watchmaker spends the day bent over the bench, loupe in one eye, assembling parts that are sometimes smaller than a millimetre. A complication, such as a perpetual calendar or a minute repeater, can take months of work on a single piece. The hands must stay steady and the mind steadier still, because a single stray thought can ruin a week’s work.
In watchmaking schools the first months are often spent filing small pieces of brass by hand, until the hand learns to stop an instant before it has taken away too much. It is not only a question of dexterity. It is a matter of learning to stay with one thing for hours without letting the attention drift: a capacity no machine replaces, and one that, once acquired, can be recognised at once in the finished work.
The result is an object that keeps time less precisely than the phone in our pocket. Those who make it know this, and so do those who buy it. Nobody buys a mechanical watch to find out the time: one buys it because it holds an enormous quantity of human attention, concentrated into a space the size of a wrist. That, far more than the gold of the case, is what makes it precious.
There is something almost ironic, then, in a gesture many people make every day: checking the time on their phone while wearing on their wrist an object built from months of concentration. Phone and watch represent two opposite ways of treating attention. The first was designed by highly skilled people to capture it and hold it for as long as possible. The second was built by people who, in order to succeed, first had to protect their own.
What Information Consumes
In 1971, long before smartphones, the economist Herbert Simon, who a few years later would receive the Nobel Prize, wrote an essay on how to design organisations for a world rich in information. It contains an observation that today reads like a prophecy: what information consumes, he wrote, is rather obvious, for it consumes the attention of its recipients. And he drew a simple conclusion from it: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Simon was thinking of executives buried under reports and memoranda. He could not have imagined how literal his sentence would become. Every app we open, every headline that scrolls past, every notification that lights up the screen lives on the same resource and competes for it with all the others. There is nothing mysterious about this, nor anything wicked: it is a market, and in that market what changes hands are the minutes in which we look.
The result is a curious inversion. For most of history, those who had money bought things and kept their free time for what they loved. Today many things are offered to us for nothing, and we pay for them with attention, the one currency that, once spent, cannot be earned again. Nor does the bill ever arrive all at once. It comes in tiny instalments, thirty seconds here and two minutes there, which is why it is so hard to notice how high it is.
It becomes clear, then, why the restaurant on that Friday evening, for all its care, is at a disadvantage. The cook has a plate and a few minutes; the screen on the table has on its side the work of thousands of people who spend every day studying how to make the next message harder to ignore. It is not a fair contest, and it is no fault of those at the table if, now and then, they lose it.
What We Choose to Notice
At the end of the nineteenth century, in an age that seems quiet to us, the American psychologist William James devoted an entire chapter of his Principles of Psychology to attention. In it he wrote a sentence of disarming simplicity: my experience is what I agree to attend to. And he added that only those things we notice shape our minds.
If James is right, and everyone’s experience seems to bear him out, attention is not merely the faculty through which we perceive the world. It is the very material our lives are made of. Two people can spend the same evening in the same restaurant and go home with two different evenings: one with the taste of a dish and the tone of a voice, the other with a handful of fragments, some of which belonged to places where they were not.
This is where attention reveals itself for what it is: a resource with rules entirely its own. Today’s cannot be set aside to spend tomorrow, nor handed to someone else, since no one can notice anything on our behalf. Money, which buys a perfect restaurant, does not buy the presence needed to realise that it is perfect. Of our attention we can decide only one thing: where to spend it.
People who work in a precise craft learn this early, and often say it in plain words. The cook who tastes the sauce for the tenth time is not wasting time, and nor is the tailor who redoes a seam no customer would ever notice: both are investing the one resource that makes the difference between good work and excellent work. Everything else, the tools and the materials, can be bought.
The Rarest Form of Generosity
There is another side to attention, and it is the one that touches us most closely. In 1942 the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote, in a letter to the poet Joë Bousquet, who had been left paralysed by a wound in the First World War, a sentence that has never stopped circulating since: attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
The context makes the sentence lovelier still. Weil was thanking Bousquet for the attention with which he had read some pages she had sent him, and she was quick to point out that this attention was no credit to the pages, but a gift from the one who had read them. A man who for more than twenty years had been unable to rise from his bed, and who would have had every reason to think only of himself, had chosen to give her his time and his mind.
Weil was not speaking of kindness or good manners. She meant something more demanding: setting aside, for a few minutes, ourselves and our own thoughts, and leaving all the room to another person. We recognise it at once when we happen to receive it: in the doctor who, instead of looking at the screen, looks at us while we speak, in the friend who does not prepare a reply while we are still explaining, in the old craftsman who listens to what we really want before telling us what we need.
Such moments are rare, and that is exactly why they stay with us. Few people remember for long the impeccable service of a hotel; many remember for years the person who, in that hotel, noticed something was wrong and asked. The attention we receive is worth more than any object because it is the one thing another person cannot give us without taking something from themselves: the time in which they might have been thinking of something else.
Perhaps this is why the highest luxury is not an object but a relationship. The tailor who remembers our measurements, the winemaker who tells us how the vintage went, the waiter who can tell from our face whether we wish to talk or to stay quiet: in each case we receive the same thing the watchmaker puts into his movement, someone’s time turned entirely towards us.
The Bill
Let us go back to the restaurant on that Friday evening. The cook spent the afternoon watching over a stock that has been simmering for hours. The sommelier chose a wine from a small estate whose owner he knows personally. The room was designed so that people can talk without raising their voices. All this attention has been placed at the disposal of the two diners. What remains to be seen is how much of theirs will go to what is on their plates, and how much to each other.
There is no lesson to be drawn, nor any advice to give. The phone is not an enemy, and whoever glances at it over dinner has lost nothing beyond repair. Still, it is hard not to notice the imbalance: we have learnt to recognise the value of attention when we find it in the objects and services we buy, and we are remarkably careless when it comes to our own. We look for it in things, while letting it slip away, a minute at a time, in the one place where no one could offer it in our stead.
The real luxury, perhaps, is not owning the handmade watch but still having the calm to look at it, and not sitting at the best table but truly being at that table, with the person across from us.
Towards the end of the meal, at the next table, one of the two turns the phone face down and puts it away in a bag. Dessert arrives. For a few minutes the two of them talk quietly, look at each other, laugh at something that cannot be heard from outside. It is the most precious moment of the evening, and it does not appear on the bill.
