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The attention economy

My sons,

I got my first iPhone a little over a decade ago. The iPhone 4S. It was beautiful. Crisp, clean lines. Beautiful form factor. Super rich and bright screen. Blazingly fast for its time. And full of all sorts of useful apps, games, and utilities. Arguably my favorite iPhone I’ve owned (and I’ve owned pretty much all of them since then), although that might be because back then you could take off the back plate and replace it with an aftermarket one, and I had a beautifully crisp white back plate with a Decepticon logo on it (thank you Richmond night market!).

That first iPhone changed my life. I now had the mother of all Swiss Army knives in my pocket and could text, surf the web, watch movies, play games, respond to emails, manage my calendar, and oh so much more.

That day also marked the day I joined the decades long war for our attention that I’m pretty sure we as a race are losing.

The optimist in me wants to assume positive intent, that the creators of our modern mobile ecosystem had set out to build a powerful and useful set of experiences that made it ever more convenient to access our ever connected world. The realist who has read articles of executives at some of these companies pushing for revenue at all costs, employing social scientists and psychologists to study and exploit the addiction-building centers of the brain, isn’t quite so sure.

Regardless, whether we know it or not we are in the fight of our lives. It is not a physical fight that brings about death at large scale, but it does bring destruction at far greater scale than traditional wars have. It is a fight for our attention, our intention, and our focus. And it is a fight whose casualties are relationships, mental health, and living lives of purpose and meaning. It is a subtle fight, one that we’re mostly not even aware of, and it is a fight without a single, identifiable, nuke-able enemy. C.S. Lewis writes that

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.“

Welcome to the attention economy.

A world of distractions

Since the dawn of commerce, shrewd business people have always tried to drum up business by inserting themselves at opportune moments to capture the attention of passersby. Whether it was the mead vendor at a medieval fair, the jade jewelry stands set up outside ancient temples, or the smattering of random knick knacks any path to a checkout counter is littered with, we have always been bombarded with upsells and distractions.

For most of human history however, those distractions required one to intentionally engage, to physically put oneself in the presence of those distractions. Home had always been a sanctuary. The advent of the modern television changed all that, and for the first time in human history, distractions were invited into the home.

It then became a short hop to someone discovering that you could make tons of money by distracting people with the right thing at the right time. And from there, we were off to the races. In the early days, ads were designed to get you to buy things - no longer. We now live in a world where an ad is just designed to get you to click on whatever the link is. Some ads are for companies selling products. Some are for self help gurus selling you a life style change. Some are for radicals selling you subtle idea shifts. As long as someone is paying for the distraction attractor, companies will continue to find new ways to exploit that and distract us.

I worked on the Kindle team for a number of years, and we measured things like long form reading (ie reading books), reading of published content as opposed to ad hoc (is social media), and trends among young people and children, and the stats are mind blowing. In the US, the percentage of teens who read books for fun dropped from 27% to 14% in the last 10 years. Only 37.6% of adults read a single short story or novel the whole year!

And yet the total reading our world is doing has drastically increased. In the US alone, social media usage tripled in the last decade, going from an average of 53 minutes to 151 minutes per day.

Clearly the distractions are winning.

Attention brings richness

What we fail to understand is that the thing that gives a rich quality to our days is our attention. It is the thing that gives depth of color to our world. It is required for building deep connections. It is required for learning. It is required for having thoughtful conversation, for being keenly aware of new surroundings, for experiencing food, music, architecture, for having a sense of wonder about life.

When we save our attention, when we thoughtfully apply it to the things that resonate with our values and our purpose, we experience a depth and quality to our interactions that is sorely missing in our world today.

Unfortunately we have a finite amount of attention resources. Those resources are used replenished when we sleep, but most of us don’t get enough sleep. This causes us to be in the perilous situation where we don’t have enough attention resources at our disposal.

There are many times where this is necessary - learning a new activity, starting a new job, being thrust into a crisis situation - these all require us to draw large amounts of capital from our resources, but this is not a long term sustainable place to be. Our brains need time to recover from exhaustion; our attention needs time to recover from overuse.

It turns out that doing things quickly and rapidly wears out our attention, while doing things slowly allows us to recover. Doing things slowly has the double benefit in that while it nurtures our ability to maintain our attention, it also ensures that are unable to fit other attention-draining fast-paced activities into our day. That truly is the secret to why monasteries are places of nurturing and healing for the soul - not the humming or the orange robes, but the culture of slowing down to get things done well.

Managing our attention

So how do we make some adjustments here? How do we make small changes and tweaks that will allow us to have more attention at our disposal, and will help us be more in control of where that attention goes?

1. Be aware. First and foremost, we need to be acutely aware of where our attention goes. There are some useful tools like Screen Time for us iPhone people that will help us tally up how often we’ve used our devices, and what apps we’re spending time on.
2. Build a plan to address FOMO. Fear of missing out is a real thing. But the reality is that most of the things we fear missing out on aren’t really that big of a deal. We live at the forefront of the age of AI - whatever plan you build to address your FOMO should include AI agents and tools to summarize and analyze the things you’d be afraid of missing so that you can have peace of mind.
3. Build a community of like minded individuals. Find others who are out to reclaim their attention, and build community with them. There is safety in numbers, there is value in walking together and keeping one another accountable, and there is great freedom in building a community of like minded individuals who are gracious to our realities that we will all miss things, and that’s okay.

Whether we are aware of it or not, and whether we like it or not, we live in an attention economy. The fight is no longer for our dollars alone; it is for our attention, our eyeballs, our time, our thoughts. It is a fight that has an unseen but sneaky enemy. It is a fight we are currently losing. But it is also a fight we can win, together.