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 ...
You’re excited. Your boss is sharing a big vision — expansion plans, revenue targets, new markets. It sounds impressive. Maybe even inspiring. You start seeing yourself as part of something grand. But somewhere in the quiet moments, you realize something: Just because the company is winning doesn’t mean you are. Your salary hasn’t changed. Your title hasn’t changed. Your workload has. You start to wonder — am I helping build a vision that has no space for mine? Poem (to keep the spirit of your other pieces): They built the dream, And I gave my days. They earned the billions, And I stayed the same. Now my rent is due, And their name is in the news. I forgot to dream my own dream While building someone else's. The Illusion of Shared Progress In Kenya, company branding can be seductive. We love to be associated with the “big names.” Safaricom, Equity, Google, KCB. There’s status in saying “I work there.” But here's the honest truth: Company growth is not employe...