Your attention is prime real estate—and you’re renting it out to clowns for free.
We, the so-called smart, upwardly mobile, tech-savvy sapiens, are shockingly liberal with the one currency more valuable than time, money, or even Bitcoin—our attention.
Hello, you magnificent, distracted mess.
I see you. You’re reading this, but a part of your brain is wondering about that notification that just lit up your phone like a mini Times Square. Another part is replaying that slightly awkward thing you said in the meeting 3 days ago. And a third, more primal part, is debating between ordering a pizza or being “good” and having a salad.
We don’t just spend our attention—we spray and pray.
We scroll through reels at 2AM, generously tipping algorithms with our focus, binge Open House debates on TV where no one is actually listening, and clap like trained seals at motivational soundbites that dissolve the moment we swipe.
In short: we’ve turned our attention into confectionary—free samples, available on every aisle.
We are so liberal with this priceless social currency called attention, we’ve made the Weimar Republic look fiscally conservative.
If this makes your morning coffee taste bitter, I am sorry: We are the first generation in human history to be simultaneously the richest and the poorest when it comes to attention—the ultimate social currency.
Think about it. Your great-grandmother could sit through a three-hour Carnatic music concert without fidgeting. Your grandfather could read the entire newspaper (yes, the physical one with actual pages) from cover to cover. But you? You can’t watch a 2-minute YouTube video without checking if someone liked your Instagram story about your breakfast.
We’ve become attention billionaires and wisdom paupers. And frankly, it’s hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.
Let’s think through this to understand what happened.
Some very smart people in Silicon Valley figured out that human attention is finite and extremely valuable. So they built machines designed to harvest it. Not metaphorically—literally.
Facebook (sorry, “Meta“) has teams of neuroscientists whose job is to make you scroll more. Netflix has algorithms that know you better than your mother. TikTok has cracked the code of the human dopamine system so efficiently that it makes casinos look like amateur operations. We can brand them the Netflix-Meta-TikTok Holy Trinity of Distraction.
The result? We’re all running on hamster wheels, thinking we’re racing toward something important, while these companies are the ones actually getting somewhere—to our wallets. And laughing all the way to the bank.
To know more about what actually happens when you pay attention, it is worthwhile to segue back to a Swedish experiment conducted some time ago. In that, they asked a group of office workers to do just one task at a time for one week. Just one. No email checking during meetings. No phone scrolling during conversations. No background music during focused work.
The results were shocking: Productivity increased by 40% | Stress levels dropped dramatically | People reported feeling more human | One guy said it was like waking up from a dream
But here’s the kicker—most participants said it felt uncomfortably slow at first. We’ve literally trained ourselves to be uncomfortable with peace.
We seem to have outsourced our boredom. And that’s NOT good news. Boredom is not the enemy—it’s the birthplace of creativity. Every great idea in history was born from someone being sufficiently bored to actually think. Silicon Valley figured out how to monetize your boredom. You’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
But now? The moment we feel the slightest hint of mental quiet, we reach for our phones like they’re oxygen masks. We’ve eliminated boredom so successfully that we’ve accidentally eliminated wonder.
We seem to be in a state of empathy recession. When you’re constantly switching between 47 different inputs, you lose the ability to deeply connect with any one thing—including other humans. We’re creating a generation of people who can manage 15 group chats but can’t have one meaningful conversation.
We’re so busy documenting our life that we forget to live it. Instagram can wait; our actual existence cannot.
The typical refrain when asked why so much attention on meaningless distraction is ” I want to keep up “- leaves you wondering, keep up with what exactly? They will quote verbatim every political scandal doing the rounds but I can bet my last cent that most are clueless about their own nervous system. They will wax eloquent on the global economy but will be totally clueless about whats happening in their own backyard.
With no exaggeration, let me tell you that if attention was cash, most of us would be declaring bankruptcy daily.
We are the first generation in human history to be simultaneously the richest and the poorest when it comes to attention—the ultimate social currency.
Your attention is not renewable. You get approximately 700,000 hours of consciousness in your lifetime. How you spend those hours is how you spend your life.
The choice is yours: Stay a broke billionaire in the attention economy, or become truly wealthy by investing your most precious resource wisely.
Globally, attention has been commodified faster than avocado toast. Entire industries profit from hijacking your eyeballs. Silicon Valley doesn’t sell tech—it sells your distraction.
We’re forever busy yet perpetually restless. Our stress warehouses are so full, we’d need GST | VAT numbers to inventory what we’ve stacked up inside.
Because attention is not neutral. It is like magnifying glass. Wherever it goes, that thing grows, amplifies. Feed gossip and outrage? Anxiety expands. Feed comparison reels? Insecurity mushrooms. Feed doomscrolling ? Congrats, you’ve invested in a flourishing stock listed on most of the world’s stock exchanges called Existential Dread Ltd.
Like water finding cracks, attention shapes our daily experience. And we’re busy watering weeds, not the oak trees.
Thought I am not encouraging you to be a rebel, I reckon it might be worth it. What is it that we could do to reclaim the territory that we have willingly bequeathed. Can we quarantine our notifications? Let me tell you that if the world is coming to an end, you will not hear it on WhatsApp or Insta first. Please add some sacred zero notice zones in your space. Morning coffee without devices. Dinner table without screens. Commute without doomscroll. It’s rebellion disguised as self-care. Single-tasking like a samurai. Responding to important emails? Then honor that task. Forget everything else. Audit your stress inventory once a week. Ask “What did I pay attention to that left me lighter?” If the list is shorter than a government queue, you know where the leaks are. Budget attention like money. Would you throw $100 notes at strangers? Then why litter your minutes mindlessly?
A gentle knock on the head to remember that every scroll is a loan. Every notification is interest. And, your mind is bankrupt.
Want less stress? Stop fertilizing it with your attention.
In closing: We’re not short on time or energy. We’re short on focus.
So, the rebellious thing today isn’t to do more. It’s to starve what doesn’t deserve your attention. Hunter-gatherer upgrade: become a selective-attention carnivore.