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Jun 2026

May I Have Your Attention?

Your most valuable resource is attention

Attention lets you feel your emotions, it lets you perceive the world, it lets you learn. Attention is finite and fleeting — you can only spend it while awake, and like time, you cannot get it back.

Letting others take your attention robs you of agency, attention is all we have.

Attention gives us the ability to learn, to create, to change, to reach peace. Attention can go by many names — prayer, meditation, mindfulness, presence, flow state, deep work, executive function. The name changes across time and cultures but the conclusion is the same, deliberate focus is one of the most valuable things a person can do.

Without attention we endure boredom, stagnation, ignorance, stress, fear.

A craftsman does not build a masterpiece without attention. The master work is built with an extreme amount of sustained attention over a long time. They must learn their trade, apply it, refine it, and hopefully pass it on to the next person. Leaving the world different than they found it.

A weightlifter without repetition has no muscle to build. Atrophy is the default state.

A writer without a focused mind leads to a silent typewriter, or worse a loud one with incoherent sentences. Their story unwritten due to a lack of focus, the words never leave their mind and make it to a page. Those words never spread to other minds, thousands of people who could have read, felt, learned, been motivated — are not. The words are seeds that remain unsown.

What a sparse world where art, music, food, stories, films, science, religion, cultures are limited because of a lack of focus.

Attention is the currency to this better world.

Commanding your attention is work. Like lifting heavy things, learning to read, or applying a skill it takes time and repetition. You have to decide and resolve to return your mind to a task. When done regularly habits form, skills advance, focus returns quicker.

It is always easier to let your attention lapse.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

— David Foster Wallace1

Worse, I believe we have built a world that actively steals our attention, making it harder than it should be.

Imagine your attention as a snow ball rolling down a hill. Small at first, gaining size and momentum as it moves. Eventually gaining a size and speed that is unstoppable at the bottom of a valley.

The world we have built has flattened this hill. Attention is bombarded with constant cheap input. Small things are no longer allowed to lead to larger ones. No momentum is gained. All progress takes extreme effort and the effort no longer compounds over time.

There is another layer to attention. What you focus your attention on influences what you are allowed to experience, what you are allowed to learn, what you are allowed to build.

You are unlikely to play a Blues lick on a guitar if you have never seen or heard of a guitar. If you only listen to the Blues you miss out on Jazz, Bluegrass, Flamenco, Metal. Your attention decides what mind you are allowed to have. You become what you pay attention to.

Authoritarian governments know this. The Great Firewall, propaganda, state-run media are all instruments of controlling attention.

If you can be told what to see or read it follow you can be told what to say or think.2

Advertisers know this. The nag factor — where researchers found children ask an average of nine times before parents relent — is taught in school, not as an ethical warning but as a tactic to increase sales.

Attention is weaponized in a deliberate, measured, systematic way.

Attention has value to you and it compounds when used, and it compounds exponentially when combined with other people’s attention.

  1. Time and attention are finite
  2. Your attention limits what you can experience
  3. Your experience limits how others can spend their attention

The default of our current world is to rob everyone of this. Constant advertisements, 24-hour news, notifications, infinite-scrolling, algorithmic feeds, ubiquitous marketing tracking. These demand attention, to topics we do not choose, and they are refined at scale to be personalized to keep you looking.

This creates a feedback loop working against us.

Here is what the cost looks like.

My family sat down to watch curling replays on Peacock for the Olympics. Our intent to be entertained by the game, learn about the rules, the physics of it, listen to the cultures clash, relax and spend time with each other.

Ads (3 min) → Curling (10 min) → Ads (2 min) → Curling (10 min) → Ads (2 min) → Curling (10 min) → Ads (2 min) → Curling (10 min) → Ads (2 min) → Curling (10 min) → Ads (2 min) → Curling (10 min) → Done

If you pause the match at any point (say to look at the house or look at signs in the crowd) the paused frame does not persist, rather an ad takes over the screen obscuring the paused frame.

If you swipe to go back 30 secs to watch a crazy shot, you are blessed with yet another 120 seconds of ads.

To get 1 hour of sport in, I’m forced to gag down 18-20min of drug commercials, beer ads, oddly sexual laundry detergent skits, insurance ads with celebrities showing up to help, or sports betting. That is a 1 part ad to 3 parts content ratio of the time spent. And that scales to 4 people watching this match.

As an aside these ads are particularly wasteful:

  • I do not gamble.
  • Light beers are nasty.
  • The detergent gives my family a rash.
  • Insurance being advertised cancelled my policy with less than 30 days notice last year.

The curling match is free because you have to give 20 min of your attention to a poorly targeted marketing campaign.

In 20 mins you can: meditate, make dinner, walk a mile, read a chapter of a book, clean a room, play a card game, call a friend, stare at the wall — all of these compound with practice and all are better than watching 20 mins of advertisements.

A person’s attention is finite, attention compounds, and the lack of attention has a cost.

When one person’s attention compounds it produces things others can build on — art, medicine, ideas. When 10,000 people waste their attention that loss compounds too. We pay collectively for what is never made.

In the United States, per user per month:3

  • TikTok — 43 hours 53 minutes
  • YouTube — 24 hours
  • Facebook — 16 hours 24 minutes

Americans spend roughly 1 hour a day watching ads4 — and that is probably low, since most entertainment and news are themselves a form of advertising.

If you use one of these platforms and are an average TV watcher, you are losing nearly 1,000 hours a year — one fifth of your waking life.

Scale this up to a society and the cost is staggering. The novel unwritten, the cure not discovered, the child not taught — these are not hypotheticals. This is the price of a distracted civilization.

Where we choose to direct our gaze determines not only what we learn or believe, but how we choose to see the world. It’s easy to overlook the fact that we can get better at what we think about, create and consume.

— Seth Godin5

I am taking great care to regain my attention. I add friction to everything that does not lead to where I choose to go. I want complete control over what is allowed to have my attention.

  • Pay for ad-free tiers or don’t watch/read/listen
  • Delete any app that supports infinite scrolling
  • No social media
  • Turn off all notifications
  • Log out of services when you are done

Automate, use plugins, set up systems so that consuming something you didn’t explicitly choose requires a decision — ideally several decisions.

The work required to find what I do want to see is essential

— Louie6

Anything that tries to shift my attention without my consent I’m taking as a personal insult, a vice, a carcinogen.

When something is free, question the cost of it, because it is not free. It costs your attention, a sacred currency that is not replaceable.

Be careful what you make easy and what you make default.

Work harder to make your priorities easy, not someone else’s. The rest of the world is working hard to make it easy for you to do what they want. Be ruthless.

What you give your attention to shows what you value. Attention is the greatest form of love.

Spend your attention well.

A previous, less useful version of this post was written on 2026-03-08 and was replaced on 2026-06-18.

It needed more attention.

Footnotes

  1. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, Kenyon College commencement address, 2005. ↩

  2. A Brief Affair (1982), closing disclaimer. Sampled by Boards of Canada on “One Very Important Thought,” YouTube. ↩

  3. We Are Social, DataReportal & Meltwater via Statista, 2024 US data. ↩

  4. Average Daily TV Viewing Time, Adwave. Based on Nielsen data showing ~25% of 3.7 hours daily TV viewing is advertising. ↩

  5. Seth Godin, Focusing Attention is a Skill, December 2023. ↩

  6. Louie Mantia, In the Battle for Attention, June 2026 ↩

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