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 a child says they want to be a teacher, a mother, a secretary, and then a singer — all in one lifetime — we smile. We find it adorable. Imaginative. But somewhere along the way, we stop smiling. We start demanding clarity, cohesion, a single label. We forget how expansive it is to be alive. In a world obsessed with consistency, we have made change look like betrayal. We question those who shift — in career, in belief, in appearance, in voice. Influencers are called sellouts. Politicians are labelled flip-floppers. Everyday people feel ashamed for outgrowing dreams that no longer fit. But what if we honored change as a natural part of being human? Why We Struggle With Change From a young age, we are taught to specialize, to narrow down, to “figure it out.” The Kenyan education system reinforces this with its early sorting into career tracks. Society praises clarity — the student who knew they wanted to be a doctor since they were six, the entrepreneur who never wavered. And yet, ve...