Attention has become a currency. Every platform, ad, and algorithm is designed to compete for it. Not just to catch our eye, but to keep it. And they’re really, really good at it.

This loss of agency over our own attention that many of us are experiencing is not about willpower. It’s about neuroscience:

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and... See more

We’re spending more and more time on things, while feeling less and less in them.

Our presence is scattered, our focus fractured; and it often feels like a personal failing.

But attention is a limited resource. And it’s being constantly pulled (hijacked, really) by an ecosystem built to monetize distraction.