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 ...
A neighbor once told me, “Si unajua tu I’m grateful?” And I remember standing there, trying to make sense of that sentence. Yes, I had done something for him. A small gesture. Ordered breakfast when he was having a rough time. But no message. No call. No proper acknowledgment. Nothing. He assumed I knew. I didn’t. And that relationship slowly died—because silence, even when coated with good intentions, can feel like neglect. The Kenyan Gratitude Gap I’ve lived here most of my life. I know how kind we can be. But I also know how emotionally lazy we’ve become when it comes to expressing thanks. We think gratitude is a formality. Or maybe a weakness. Or maybe we just never learned. We assume: Saying "thank you" is enough. People should know we appreciate them. Kindness doesn't need follow-up. But here's the truth: not all thank-yous are created equal . You can't say “thanks” for a life raft the same way you do for a bottle of water. Scenario ...