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 woman chooses not to marry. Another decides not to have children. A third chooses to invest her energy into her career, or perhaps into travel, or art, or activism. These are simple personal choices—no different from a man choosing to remain a bachelor, or a man choosing to have children later in life, or none at all. And yet, in Kenya (and elsewhere), when women make these choices, the world often reacts as if she has staged a rebellion. Worse still, her decisions are interpreted not as choices for herself but as choices against men . Why is that? When Choice Is Misread as Rejection When a woman says she does not want to get married, it is common to hear whispers: “She hates men,” “She was hurt before,” or “She thinks she’s better than everyone else.” But when a man says the same? He is seen as independent, perhaps even smart for “avoiding drama.” When a woman chooses not to have children, she is told she will regret it, that she is rejecting family life, that she is “selfi...