In all the time I’ve spent watching people use the Web, the thing that has struck me most is the difference between how we think people use Web sites and how they actually use them. When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized
These companies, the attention economy itself, and the consumerist society that gave birth to it, deploy vast resources to turn as many people as possible into passive consumers, to reduce us to our eyeballs and our wallets. Because the more control a company can get over those things, the better their stocks will perform.
Run your own race, as in: you set certain standards for yourself, and you focus on meeting them. When you meet them, you’re proud of yourself. When you don’t, you urge yourself to try harder. You don’t question your standards based on what anyone else is doing.