Attention is not a resource. It is a relationship.
We were told to manage it, protect it, spend it wisely. What if attention was never ours to hoard in the first place?
Cover image Photo by Yuri Efremov / Unsplash
We talk about attention the way we talk about money: we spend it, we save it, we complain that someone stole it. The vocabulary is so familiar that we no longer notice what it assumes.
But attention is not stored anywhere. It exists only between you and something else: a book, a friend, a view from a window. It is less like a currency and more like a conversation.
You do not have attention. You pay it, and something pays you back.
Seen this way, the problem with our screens is not that they take something from us. It is that they offer a relationship that never deepens. The fix is not discipline, but better company.
