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 ...
There’s a line I came across that I haven’t been able to forget: " In some ways, wealth simply means paying attention to the prices you pay." It sounds simple, almost obvious. But when you really think about it — it’s quietly revolutionary. Because we Kenyans, like much of the world, are always paying. We pay in shillings, in time, in stress, in sleep, in borrowed peace. And most times, we do it without noticing. The tragedy isn’t that life is expensive — it’s that we don’t realize what it’s truly costing us. The Hidden Prices We Pay We live in a world that constantly tells us what we should want. The right phone. The right shoes. The right wedding. The right image of success. We nod along, swipe the card, take the loan, and promise ourselves we’ll figure it out later. Because everyone else seems to be doing the same. But everything has a price. That phone upgrade may cost you your emergency fund. That flashy lifestyle may cost you your peace of mind. That “soft ...