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 ...
There are things we do not grieve, because we learned to live without them too early. Not because they were unimportant, but because the world rearranged itself in a way that made their absence feel normal. February asks us to speak about love loudly — romance, desire, grand gestures. But this is not that kind of piece. This is about something quieter and more foundational: our capacity for ordinary human closeness. The ease of speaking to a stranger. The courage to suggest coffee without pretext. The ability to sit in someone’s presence without agenda or performance. I think often about how entire generations adapt to the worlds they inherit. Not consciously. Not philosophically. We simply learn what is required, and shed what is not. When I watched a documentary about Hasidic Jewish communities in New York — particularly those who choose to leave — I was struck less by the act of leaving, and more by the origin of the structure they were leaving behind. After the Holocaust, survi...