Attention as the Last Scarcity

for most of history the scarce thing was information. you paid for it in effort or money or blood. the library was rare. the expert was rare. the book was rare. knowing anything was expensive.

then the internet made information free. and everyone said this was the great equalizing thing and in some ways it was.

but scarcity did not disappear. scarcity moved.

it moved from what you could know to what you could pay attention to. from access to focus. from the library to the room in your head where you actually let something in.

the machines have finished this migration. they have made everything else free. what remains is attention. attention is the last scarcity and it is running out.

your attention is the most valuable thing you own now and this is not a metaphor. every business on earth has organized itself around extracting it from you. the phone in your pocket is designed by people paid a great deal of money to make sure you cannot look away from it. the platforms are engineered against your capacity to focus. the ads follow your eyes. the algorithms model your weakest moments.

this is not because these people are evil. it is because your attention is the resource. everything else has been mined. attention is what is left. and there is a lot of it in aggregate, and very little of it in each of us individually, and someone is going to get it.

the only question is whether it will be you.

i think about this a lot. what deserves my attention.

not what wants it. what deserves it.

almost nothing that wants your attention deserves it. this is the thing to understand. the fight for your attention is asymmetric. the things that need your attention to survive — the platforms, the alerts, the arguments, the outrage cycles — are engineered to get it. the things that would actually change your life are quiet. they do not fight. they wait.

the book waits. the person across the table waits. your own body waits. the essay you were going to write waits. the walk you were going to take waits. they do not push. they cannot compete with the notification. they were never trying to.

you have to go to them on purpose or they lose.

taste, in the end, is a form of attention allocation. it is deciding what gets to have you.

when i say taste is the last scarcity i mean this literally. the person who can decide what to attend to — who can shut most of it off and give the small remainder to what actually matters — is the person who still has a life. everyone else is a channel. everyone else is a surface being written on by whoever is paying.

your attention was the point. the whole time. it was what your life was made of. an hour spent scrolling is an hour of your life that got spent. it did not appear again. the machine got fed and you got tired and that is what happened.

i work in ai and i want to be honest that i am part of this. the systems i build compete for your attention too. they get better every year at holding it. i cannot pretend i am not in the machine.

what i can do is write this down. and refuse it in my own life where i can. and tell you that if there is one skill worth practicing in the next ten years it is this. the ability to close the tab. the ability to sit with the quiet thing that was not fighting for you. the ability to give your attention to what deserves it and take it back from what does not.

attention is not currency. it is life. it is the substance of the days.

spend it on what appreciates.

— bella