Our attention is finite, yet we spend it everywhere but where it matters. This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. Attention economics is the idea that in a world overflowing with information, human attention becomes the scarce resource. Whoever captures it, holds power. Over time, this has reshaped not just markets, but inner lives. What we notice. What we ignore. What we can tolerate. What we can no longer sit with. For a long time, people warned that television would rot our brains. In hindsight, television looks almost generous. A show required you to stay for forty minutes. A film asked for two hours. A detective story invited you to notice details, to remember names, to hold multiple threads in your mind at once. You watched. You followed. You waited. Listening to music meant staying long enough to learn lyrics. Reading meant sitting with confusion until meaning arrived. Writing a poem meant wrestling with language, not skimming it. Even boredom had a purpose—it ...
“They said I should be grateful I had a job. But I was working 7 days a week, 14 hours a day, for a salary that barely fed me. I was too tired to think. Too scared to leave.” There is a story here that echoes across Kenya—quietly, persistently, and in the voices of people trying to make something of themselves. But often, it’s not progress they are making. It’s pain they are collecting. Because sometimes, we accept destruction in the name of progress. The Girl Who Chose Pain Over Poverty Take a girl from Kibera or Mathare. She is 16, maybe 17. She’s missed school for weeks because she doesn’t have sanitary towels. Her mother sells vegetables; her father is rarely around. A boda guy in the area notices her discomfort and hands her a pack of pads. The next month he brings another. Then chips and soda. Then small money. Then she moves in with him. And just like that, she stops being a child. The guy turns violent. She gets pregnant. She drops out of school for good. At 18, she’s a mother ...