What My Dad Taught Me About Paying Attention

My dad would probably object to this title on medical grounds.

Not because he would disagree with the sentiment, but because he was recently diagnosed with ADHD and would quite rightly point out that ‘paying attention’ has never been his most reliable administrative gift. He would find that very funny. He would probably interrupt me halfway through reading this to say so, disappear into what seemed like an unrelated anecdote, and then, ten minutes later, land exactly where he meant to.

So I should be clear: I do not mean attention in the dull, managerial sense. I do not mean tidy inboxes, colour-coded calendars, or the kind of sterile concentration modern life mistakes for virtue. I mean the willingness to stay open to the world. To let other people’s lives register as real. To treat what is happening beyond the boundaries of your own comfort not as a faint background hum, but as material and morally relevant.

That is what my dad taught me.

The car

I think I was about ten or eleven when politics stopped sounding like something remote, and began to feel alive. At the time I was a competitive swimmer, which meant long drives to training in the late afternoon: school uniform still on, kit bag on the back seat, the car smelling faintly of chlorine and damp towel. The journeys were about forty minutes, which is a very long time when you are a child and, as it turns out, a strangely formative amount of time when you are with the right person.

My dad always had BBC Radio 4 on. For a while we became mildly obsessed with Eddie Mair’s five o’clock show.

This does not sound, on paper, like ideal material for a ten year old girl. Radio 4 has a special effect on children, which is that it makes sound itself feel beige. Maybe brown. Corduroy-sounding. It should have been impossibly boring. But my dad has always had a gift for making almost anything feel vivid. He can extract drama from a local council dispute. He can make tax policy sound like the opening chapter of a political thriller. Most importantly, he has never spoken to children as though they are too small for the world. He speaks as if things matter, and assumes you are capable of understanding why.

The Arab Spring was unfolding. Libya. Gaddafi. Uprisings. State violence. Men on the radio speaking in those grave, clipped tones that make history sound both immediate and impossibly far away. I do not remember the chronology with any confidence now. I remember the shape of it more than the detail. I remember being fascinated, not frightened exactly, but awed. It had the force of a story, except the stakes were real and people were actually dying.

And I remember my dad talking about it in a way that made it impossible to file under adult business. He did not sanitise it or patronise me. He did not give me the impression that politics was just a television genre others liked to argue about. He made it feel human and close.

I think, underneath that, I was learning something else too, though I would not have had the language for it then. I was beginning to understand what privilege really means. Not in the flattened, defensive way the word gets thrown around now, but in its simplest sense: the luck of where you are born. The luck of safety. The luck of encountering political violence as news rather than as the organising fact of your life.

I was in London, on the way to swimming training, listening through a car speaker to events that were remaking other people’s worlds. I had done nothing to deserve the stability into which I had been born. They had done nothing to deserve its absence. The distance between us was not moral. It was geographic, historical, imperial, accidental. That recognition lodged itself somewhere deep inside me.

I have been politically restless ever since. It began, as many things do, with adolescent overconfidence and an unauthorised Twitter account. Then A Level Politics. Then university, and a master’s. With it came the full ideological unravelling: class analysis, hegemony, imperialism, state power, the slow dawning realisation that ‘there is no alternative’ is less an argument than a hostage note. I became more left wing as I got older. I suspect my dad was not entirely surprised. After all, he had set the whole thing in motion.

But what he gave me was not, fundamentally, an ideology - that came later. What he gave me first was a habit: a refusal to treat the world beyond your own life as atmosphere. A sense that other people’s suffering was not scenery to your comfort, or background to your ambitions, or material to consume and then move on from. It mattered that it was happening. It mattered that you knew.

What it means to know

That is a simple lesson when you are a child. It becomes harder as you get older, not because it stops being true, but because adulthood offers you a thousand ways to evade it.

You are taught to protect your own equilibrium. To manage your reactions, to avoid becoming ‘too online’, too earnest, too angry, too emotionally porous. Politics is flattened into taste, or branding, or professional risk. Serious moral attention starts to be treated as either naive or performative, depending on who is judging. You are expected to know enough to seem informed, but not so much that it rearranges you. Certainly not so much that it makes demands on your life.

And yet the fact itself remains: some people are permitted to experience violence as information, others experience it as life.

That, to me, is the beginning of politics. Not cleverness. Not even ideology, at first. Just the refusal to pretend that the accident of your own safety absolves you of responsibility to what happens elsewhere.

I do not mean responsibility in the grandiose sense. I do not mean fantasising that feeling strongly is the same as stopping bombs. I mean something smaller and more difficult: refusing indifference. Refusing the constant invitation to regard other people’s suffering as intermittently interesting and fundamentally optional.

Gaza

This is the thought I keep coming back to when I think about Gaza.

Not because Gaza exists to illustrate my own moral development, and not because I imagine myself unusually good at bearing witness. Quite the opposite. I am not outside the culture of scrolling, numbing, compartmentalising and moving on. None of us are. The point is not that I have escaped it. The point is that Gaza has made the cost of it impossible to ignore.

For almost two years, we watched a society being destroyed in real time. Not in the retrospective way states prefer, through future documentaries and solemn anniversary essays about what should have been done. We watched it as it was being done. We watched people film from hospital courtyards, from tents, from ambulances, from the ruins of their homes.We watched parents hold children whose names the world would never learn. Whole family lines disappeared in public so routinely that journalists reached for a new word for it: familicide. We watched language strain under the scale of what it was being asked to describe. By the time a ceasefire finally held, more than 70,000 Palestinians had been killed by official count - with researchers consistently finding the real figure significantly higher once indirect deaths from destroyed healthcare, contaminated water and deliberate starvation are included. And all the while, many of the governments most loudly committed to human rights continued to arm, defend, excuse or obscure.

What Gaza exposed with unusual clarity was not only the brutality of Israeli violence or the cowardice of western political elites, though both matter. It exposed something about the moral structure of distance itself. It showed that knowing is not the same as acting. That visibility is not the same as solidarity. That people can witness atrocity in extraordinary detail and still experience it as something that enters their lives merely as content: upsetting, perhaps, but skippable; tragic, but not binding.

The ability to look away, meanwhile, was never equally available. For some people in Britain, Gaza was a horrifying news story. For others it was family WhatsApps going unanswered. Names being scanned on hospital lists. Relatives who could not be reached. Grief that did not arrive through a feed and could not leave through one either. As always, the distribution of distance followed the old lines: race, empire, citizenship, whose suffering is read as universally human and whose is treated as politically inconvenient, excessive, or suspect.

The UK knew what it was doing. In September 2024, the government admitted there was a 'clear risk' that British arms exports to Israel might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law, and suspended some licences - but not all of them. Components linked to the F-35 programme continued flowing. When that decision was challenged in court, it was upheld. The state's position was effectively this: yes, there is a clear risk; yes, these violations are serious; but not serious enough to interrupt the architecture of alliance. That is not confusion, it’s policy.

And this is where the silence around Gaza stopped being merely sad and became ideological. Because the lesson people were quietly encouraged to draw was not only that it was terrible, but that it was too complicated, too inflammatory, too professionally risky, too easy to get wrong. That nothing meaningful could be done, so the sensible response was to preserve your peace. That posture protected something very material: diplomatic alignments, military partnerships, the fiction that the western rules-based order means what it says. Power does not always survive by making people agree with it. Quite often it survives by making resistance feel futile, embarrassing, or emotionally unserious.

That is why I keep resisting the language of ‘awareness’, as if the problem were simply that people did not know enough. We all knew. The problem was never just ignorance. It was the ease with which knowledge could be absorbed without consequence. The ease with which other people’s annihilation could be metabolised into opinion, then fatigue, then silence.

And this is the point at which I come back, again, to luck. I was not better than the children whose lives were being pulverised. I was just elsewhere: safer, more protected by borders, by citizenship, by history, by the fact of having been born into the centre rather than the target zone. That is not a guilt complex, it is a political fact. And it seems to me that the least that fact demands is that I do not make a virtue of my own distance.

The quiet is not peace

Now the noise has lowered, which is not the same thing as justice. The feed has moved on. Other stories have arrived to compete for moral bandwidth. This is the moment when the habit matters most. Not when horror is at its loudest; the feed can do some of the work then, however badly. But afterwards, when the algorithm decides the story is over. When the people with the option of looking away begin to exercise it. When forgetting starts to feel less like a choice than like the natural order of things.

That is how catastrophe gets absorbed into history: not only through denial, but through normalisation. Through the gradual decision, repeated at scale, that something intolerable has become too familiar to hold in view.

I think that is what my dad gave me, in that car, without either of us fully knowing it. Not a script. Not a theory of everything. Just the sense that the world was real, and that reality made claims on you. That history was not background, and the distance between your life and somebody else’s devastation did not make their devastation less important, only easier for you to ignore.

I think about that girl in the car sometimes. She was lucky - not only to be safe, but to be taught that other people’s unsafety was real and demanded something of her. She did not know yet what it would demand. I am still working that out. But I know it does not end because the trending topic changed. I know that a ceasefire is not peace. More than 90% of Gaza's population remains displaced. Famine has been declared and the conditions that produced it have not been undone. Since the ceasefire announcement, nearly 680 more Palestinians have been killed. The quiet is not peace, it is just quieter. I know that the people of Gaza do not have a feed to scroll past, an app to mute, or a news cycle to wait out.

My dad taught me that the world was worth noticing properly. Gaza is still there.