Our attention creates our world. What we pay attention to shapes our identity, and how we percieve our identity is a large part of the problems we create for ourselves. Of course, that’s not to say all our problems are self-made. Continuing to hold on to our grudges, our fears, our cynical viewpoints doesn’t serve us. Unfortunately, letting go of these chains on our soul doesn’t serve the attention merchants like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Disney+, Netflix, Quora, Epic Games, Rockstar, and many other B2B companies supporting and feeding off their ecosystems. If it’s an entertainment company, it’s stealing your attention to sell to others.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with blowing off steam with a little entertainment consumption. Watching a TV show with your family or playing a few games here and there can be part of undwinding. The issue is many of the forms available to us like video games, TV series, movies, videos, thriller novels, shorts, becoming addictive and compulsory. Lately I’ve been liking videogames to relax. Sometimes, I find myself sometimes playing a video game, but when I’m done playing for the night I feel dissatisfied with how I’ll never get that time back. Projects or ideas remain in their current state of stalled progress. I’ve felt excited to finish a videogame before because I’ll be free of the need to finish it and can do more fulfilling things. Time is our most important resource, and attention merchants steal it away.

Scrolling for meaningless content doesn’t make us any better, but it takes time away from us. Everyone has dreams. Some people really don’t have the resources (including time) to follow their dreams. Many others make excuses and don’t realize how much time they give to attention merchants. 5 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes during breakfast, 25 minutes at lunch, a couple 5 minute sessions throughout the evening and you’ve wasted an hour. Writing articles can be done on your phone in 5 minute bursts as the ideas come to your head. Even 3 minutes of meditation can have significant impact on your life. Learning the piano can be done with 15 minutes every day. Think about what you could do if you had 25 hours in the day. You could spend more time with your kids, build a picnic bench, or learn to cut your hair. Clickbait articles, social media, video games, and assembly-required journalism eat away at your time and ability to do these goals if consumed mindlessly.

Attention merchants don’t just steal your time, they will try their best to turn you into someone different than who you want to be. Our brains are great information seekers. We want to know about the world to be safe, and our brains sometimes search for information in unhelpful places. Ruminating for the thirtieth time over a failed relationship won’t usually turn over new information, but it will degrade your self worth or anger you.

Audience segmentation is a main product of these attention merchants that they sell to thousands of smaller companies that actually advertise to you. They put you into boxes like:

  • high-achiever who looks down on lazy people
  • a bit of a misandrist
  • secretly wants kids but can’t tell her friend group

or

  • older man who thinks young kids don’t work hard enough
  • maybe white
  • has a distaste for feminism

or

  • likes guns
  • pro-LGBTQ+
  • outraged by conservatives

There’s nothing wrong with individual differences, in fact we should be celebrating them and bathing in the overlap in our shared humanity. The issue is people don’t fall neatly into boxes. The attention merchants have hired hundreds of thousands of the brightest minds to push people into the boxes they observe. If we are divided, we can be put into boxes and easily manipulated by Russian or Chinese spies like in the 2016 US election. They want to trap you into a box by slowly feeding you more and more content that will inevitably shape you due to our base pyschology. The beauty of this psychology is that no one is immune, even if you know about the psychological hacks these app developers use. These happen at a lower level then our intellect. They want to mold you to be the perfect consumer, and then they’ll sell both your interest and your mindset to companies that want you to buy stuff you don’t need. You wouldn’t be okay with someone taking money out of your wallet, so why be okay with a more sophisticated attempt with extra steps?

You can give these titans of industry the finger by controlling your attention. Avoiding the urge to check in with social media is a radical act. Turning your own attention to the real, fulfilling activies is taking money away from the attention merchants who want to invade every second of your time. Controlling your attention is easy to say, but hard to do. A good start is mindfulness meditation, and then using that mindfulness when you unlock your phone.

They take our attention for money, but to us our attention is worth so much more. Your quality of life is the formation of your attention. Your habits make you, and we shouldn’t let them make our habits. If our attention is so valuable to attention merchants, why isn’t it valuable to us? Our life ultimately amounts to what we paid attention to. Owning your own existence in this beautiful, difficult world is a priceless reward for this effort. Freedom is wealth.