Attention is All You Have

Attention is the currency of life. Time moves, the hours and days slip by, but not all of them are spent equally. It is possible, and common, to "spend time" on something without really "paying attention." Time can be spent in a shallow way, but attention paid diligently has depth. Fragmented attention is a slow bleed on our finite balance of temporal wealth.

What I'm saying is that life is short. Yes, we're living longer than ever, but our attention is being sapped in a thousand different ways. Exponentially more ways than, say, a medieval peasant, who might have lived a much shorter life. The physical toll on our bodies is much lighter than pre-industrial civilization, but the toll on our cognition and its bandwidth is exponentially greater.

That medieval peasant would probably consume the same amount of information in their whole life that we consume in a week. But our hardware hasn't been upgraded. Same neural structure, same bandwidth limitations.

I have a belief and hope that AI will do for our minds what the steam engine did for our bodies. We're in the womb of a cognitive revolution. Labor will be displaced but not replaced. All of us are grateful we're not doing back-breaking physical work to scrape by; nobody regrets the steam engine or the spinning jenny.

Our attention now is often spent poorly. There's an established term for what we're discussing: information overload. There was a flurry of literature and discussion on information overload in the early 2000s, but not so much anymore. The frog was slowly boiled and now we don't notice it directly. Bring on the emails, meetings, threads, docs, news, feeds, and likes. They were all spoon-fed into our neural chemical makeup via dopamine hacking so that we ended up wanting them, and sliver by sliver they steal the wealth of our attention.

Notification icons are red because red creates physiological arousal. Red triggers some evolutionary wiring in us that perceives it as urgent and important. Every app has red notifications, Slack has red notifications, so does Teams. It's a flood of evolutionary arousal. Apps do not need this level of integration into my psychology or physiology to be useful. If everything is urgent, then nothing is. It's just static, noise.

No one wants this. This is a pickpocket that steals pennies at a time, and so we don't make a fuss. But a penny here or there adds up to our entire fortune eventually. Our endowment of time on this earth is small, and how we spend it is the only real decision we get to make.

My own unscientific guess tells me that 90%+ of what pulls on my attention every day is irrelevant. But you don't know that until after you've dedicated attention to it. Triage itself takes attention, and if enough is coming at you, triage will take all of it. What's left?

Here is my hope for the solution. I want an information bouncer with a clipboard and a bad attitude that stands at the doors to my attention and keeps the riffraff out. It can triage so I don't have to. I don't need an AI friend, or even really an assistant, although arguably great assistants are like bouncers. I want AI to go hacking through the bullshit jungle with a machete.

More focus, and attention invested deeply in fewer things, more compounding returns on those investments, less fragmentation, less feeling like our pockets are being picked. That seems worth building.