I have been thinking lately about how expensive it has become to simply exist.
Not in dollars. In attention.
Everywhere I look, someone is trying to purchase a a piece of my lifespan. The phone lights up with a notification that’s not urgent. The email inbox fills with “last chance” offers that somehow return every week. I watch a video and there are two ads before it, one in the middle, and a soft suggestion at the end that I might also like something else. Even the gas pump has a screen yelling at me.
The attention economy is not subtle.
The term itself has been around for decades, but it feels newly feral in the age of algorithmic feeds and infinite scroll. Platforms are not designed to inform me or even entertain me. They are designed to keep me looking. Looking equals data. Data equals ads. Ads equal money. My focus is the raw material.
It is not just advertisements either. It is propaganda in softer clothing. Sensational headlines engineered to make me outraged enough to click. Political posts optimized to inflame. Lifestyle content curated to make me feel slightly inadequate so I will purchase the remedy. A constant drip of comparison, crisis, consumption.
An onslaught.
There is a kind of psychic fatigue that comes from being marketed to at all times.The sheer act of filtering, dismissing, and bracing against persuasion takes energy.
My attention is not a natural resource to be strip-mined.
It is the soil of my life. It is what grows my relationships, my projects, my garden beds, my slow mornings, my journal pages. If I allow it to be fragmented into a thousand micro-transactions, I should not be surprised when I feel scattered and thin.
I do not think the solution is to throw my phone into the bog and live as a hermit. I live here, in this era. But I do think there is quiet rebellion in choosing where my eyes rest.
Boredom, in this economy, is a luxury.
Every time I choose to cook a meal instead of scroll through ten people cooking better ones, I am reclaiming something. Every time I sit with a book, or weed the garden, or write a page just for myself, I am stepping outside the auction.
They can keep the billboards.
I am trying to cultivate a mind that is not for sale.
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