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 ...
In Kenya, few social realities are as visible — and as normalized — as single motherhood. Walk into any Kenyan town , village , or estate and you will hear it: “ single mother .” It rolls off tongues with ease, as if it were the most natural title in the world. It carries weight, stigma, sometimes pity, sometimes pride. We hear phrases like “I was raised by a single mother” or “She’s doing it all on her own” so often that they hardly spark a second thought. But pause for a moment: why does the phrase exist in the first place? Why is there no equal and opposite phrase — “ absentee father ” — that carries the same recognition, the same punch, the same weight in society? This question matters because it reveals not just our family structures , but also our values as a people . The Normalization of “Single Mother” In Kenya, the term single mother has become so normalized that it is almost part of our cultural vocabulary . It is said casually, often with ...