We have become a people who have eyes but don’t see. We look, certainly. We do a tremendous amount of looking. We look at headlines, notifications, emails, apps, photographs, DMs, and TikToks. We look at more visual information in an afternoon than people in prior times might have encountered in weeks, I suspect. In fact, as early as 2017, Facebook executives had calculated that the average person scrolls through at least 300 feet of items on their phone every day. And that was nearly a decade ago.

But just because you have looked at something, doesn’t mean you have seen it. Seeing is the first step in grasping reality as it is. It is the discipline of attending to reality outside of yourself and allowing the world to make itself known. This of course requires that you don’t immediately and habitually sort what you are looking at into the expedient categories of useful, interesting, productive, entertaining, or relevant.

The interesting part is that you can lose your sight, yet be blind to your blindness. This isn’t an all-at-once experience like a reverse epiphany. It’s more subtle, slow, and gradual. The darkening happens bit by bit until the world around you feels drab and grey. A tree becomes scenery. A neighbor becomes a person you wave to as you pull in the garage. A favorite piece of music becomes background noise. A meal becomes fuel.

How can you recover your sight?

First, something must interrupt you. Something outside you that you do not control. A bird call in the morning that is new. A child’s question. Grief. Beauty. For a moment, something in the world refuses to remain in the background and demands your attention. The first movement toward recovered sight enters less as an achievement than as a gift. You can make room for it, but you can’t conjure it. You can only respond to it.

Second, in the turn from looking to seeing, you perceive that you had not been seeing before. You must agree with yourself, and with the reality that has grabbed you by the scruff of your neck, that you are, in fact, not seeing well. This requires strength of ego and humility. For arrayed against you are all the technopoly powers lulling you with false words that you are in fact seeing clearly. They have extensive interest in monetizing not just your labor, but your leisure.

Third, recovery of sight requires an accurate diagnosis. Why are you not seeing? Are you looking at too much? Is the 300 vertical feet of scrolling each day blinding you? Is your total absorption and enslavement by practical purposes and goals leaving you exhausted? Are you incapable of boredom? Have you so thoroughly filled the nooks and crannies of your life that nothing uninvited can appear?

Fourth, you need a cure. A diagnosis will only get you so far before you fall back into darkness with unseeing eyes. The philosopher Josef Pieper suggests that abstinence has a role to play here. He suggests that visual fasting is part of the cure. In our cultural moment, that might include turning the phone and computer off and walking outside with a friend or neighbor. In doing so, Pieper suggests that you can create an empty space where something other than your own appetites and entertainments might appear. Simone Weil suggests that this kind of fasting opens you up to a kind of waiting, an active passivity much like standing in the water knowing the wave will crash over you but allowing it to anyway. You remove some of what keeps the senses perpetually occupied so that attention can change its posture from consuming to receiving, from using to beholding, from projecting yourself onto the world to allowing the world to correct you. Abstinence, however, is only part of the posture that will allow you to see.

Fifth, you must say yes to something else. You must learn to love something else in place of the scroll and swipe. And for recovery of sight, artistic creation of new speech, color, form, rhythm, sound, canvas, stone, and film can be the perfect antidote. These disciplines force us out of generic perception and back into particulars. They train us to see again.

Recovery is therefore both receptive and active: we cannot cause the initial awakening, but we can become the kind of people more available to being awakened, and more capable of remaining with what has appeared. Learning to see again is not something that is achieved and complete. Rather it is a form of being-on-the-way. It is a practice for which you will never outgrow your need.

The work begins here: not with trying to become more productive with your looking or attention, but learning how to see so that the reality of the world around you becomes visible once again.