“Do you like card games?” When my friend asked me this question, it sounded innocent enough. Pat came my reply “Yes, I do…”. We were talking about something completely different. Minutes before that, we had all been drawn into the dopamine-flooded world of our phones. Our attention had been effectively hijacked by our screens and taken away from the shared space of being with each other. Cabo proved to be the perfect antidote; it brought us back into the space of a living room, where we did some good living.
A game of Cabo grabbed my attention. It wrestled my attention away from the worries and stories about my day. Cabo, a card game (new to me), took some learning and hence caused a pattern interrupt in my attention. I, for one learnt a new game. We laughed a lot. We had highs and lows of winning and losing. We shared stories about how the game was introduced to them and how many evenings of entertainment it has provided. It was fun, with friction. For a second, I felt like saying. I’m too tired to learn something new. I don’t want to do the hard work of remembering the rules and who has what card.
It felt hard because I had to pay attention. The phone, on the other hand, often offers frictionless fun. Scrolling is cheap dopamine. It feels good, it sucks me in and leaves me feeling bad, like empty calories do. Mindlessly moving from one piece of content to the next. Instead, I had now signed up for a game of Cabo.
A little bit of online research into why the game is called Cabo, points towards possible Spanish origins, with the game recorded as being played by students in Spain and drawing from the word “cambio” meaning “exchange”. However, there is a clear origin story – Cabo is a 2010 card game by Melissa Limes and Mandy Henning that involves memory and minimising your score, based on the classic Golf card game, and is like Rat-a-Tat Cat (1995).
The objective of the game is for each player to minimize the sum of their own cards, four of which are played face down to the table at the start of a round. This little online expedition that took me down a rabbit hole of discovery is different from scrolling. It felt good to explore a new topic and double-click on a serendipitous discovery of a new, fun card game that is good for building cognitive skills. The thought that I may introduce someone else to the game, courtesy of this article, is the bonus.
William James, philosopher and psychologist, said it plainly over a century ago: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” James’s theoretical perspective on psychology came to be known as functionalism, which sought causal relationships between internal states and external behaviors.
We live in the age of AI, and the attention economy is where we spend our precious currency of time and energy. Here is me reminding myself that as a coach and a communications professional, the currency of my tradecraft (attention) is precious.
Giving and receiving attention is not to be frittered away on frictionless dopamine doom scrolling. It should be treated with the respect it deserves. Who gets my attention? Who gives me attention? What consumes my waking hours? Important questions to ask. Are you paying attention? If not, someone else and something else will eat up precious minutes, hours, and days of your life.
From the smattering of Bengali that I have learnt, the phrase “Attention Khabo?” seems to be a good note to end on. Khabo, meaning “I will eat” or “I will drink,” is widely used for consuming both food and liquids. So very literally, “Will you like to eat or drink some attention?”
I keep reminding myself, “intention drives attention”. I must pay attention to where my attention goes and makes smarter choices about what I feed it with. If what I notice shapes my reality, it’s a perfect time for a reality check. I must pay attention to my truth, and it will become me. That’s the power of an insight; it has the power to shape the outside world.
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