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 ...
When I do take an Uber or Bolt , I’m always struck by how different the experiences can be. Same direction, sometimes even the same time of day — yet never the same ride. Some drivers are masters of the road. They anticipate traffic before it builds, weave through shortcuts with ease, and carry an almost instinctive knowledge of the city. Others, though, seem completely lost. They rely entirely on Google Maps , miss obvious turns, and sometimes admit they’re not familiar with the area at all. One driver once told me he had just dropped a passenger nearby and was simply hoping to catch another fare before heading back to his side of town. Another revealed something surprising: the app itself often works against them. Sometimes a ride request goes to drivers far away while those parked just around the corner never get it — or see it too late. He even insisted that the type of phone a driver owns can determine how quickly requests appear. So here we are: the same job, the same cars, ye...