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 ...
For the past month, I’ve been watching Netflix — something I rarely do. I don’t subscribe to entertainment platforms; I don’t binge shows; I don’t keep up. But this month, I scrolled, sampled, and let myself be carried through the endless conveyor belt of content. And somewhere between dating shows, scripted drama, and predictable plots, I realized something unsettling: so much of what we call “entertainment” isn’t reflecting life — it’s scripting it. The stories may look different, but the messaging is the same. A dating show in Los Angeles echoes one in Brazil, which mirrors one filmed in South Africa. And the formula hardly shifts: alcohol, tension, betrayal, temptation, chaos. Reality TV is not reality — it’s a machine of engineered dysfunction dressed as modern love. What surprised me wasn’t the drama. It was the consistency. Why do all these shows rely on the same emotional ingredients? Why is alcohol a permanent character? Why is infidelity an expectation rather than a...