What do we let in? This question, fundamental for James, has acquired new weight in our moment. When the horizon of the possible expands infinitely, when we can generate endless images and texts and variations, the problem shifts from scarcity to abundance. Not: can I make this? But: should I attend to this?

James’s phrase “what I agree to attend to” carries a note of volition that’s easy to miss. Attention isn’t something that simply happens to us. It’s something we negotiate with, something we allow or refuse. The chaos he describes, experience without “selective interest,” might sound abstract, but anyone who has fallen down a hole of infinite scrolling or infinite generation knows it viscerally. The feeling of overwhelm is really the feeling of attention without anchor.

For those who make things, this has specific implications. Every tool that generates possibilities also generates the need to choose among them. The capacity to iterate infinitely becomes interesting only when paired with the capacity to stop, to say this one, to let interest settle somewhere and stay. What makes your interest settle where it does? What draws your noticing? These preferences, these gravitational pulls, might constitute the real shape of your creative life more than any output ever could.

There’s something almost moral in James’s framing: we are responsible for our attention, and therefore responsible for who we become through attending. The creative question is never merely what we’re capable of making. It’s what we’re willing to truly notice, what we let pass into the deeper chambers of experience, and what we leave at the threshold as mere noise.