How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Economist Herbert Simon, whose 1971 essay on the attention economy is one of the single most insightful meditations on attention ever published, observed long before the age of constant smartphone push notifications that a “wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.

we could use a moment to examine the relationship between attention span and the speed of information exchange.

‘Nothing is harder to do than nothing,’ remarks the author and artist Jenny Odell.10 But to get better at it is to begin to regain your autonomy – to stop being motivated by the attempt to evade how reality feels here and now, to calm down, and to make better choices with your brief allotment of life.

If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.