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 ...
Behind every bare, fenced plot lies a story of a forest felled, a community displaced, or a species exiled. This is land speculation in Kenya. In Kenya, owning land is more than a milestone—it’s a rite of passage. Advertisements promise “affordable plots with ready title deeds,” targeting salaried urbanites and diaspora Kenyans. Entire WhatsApp groups are dedicated to the dream of landownership. But beneath the aspiration lies an uncomfortable truth: the booming land market is one of the most ethically neglected sectors in the country. 1. The Anatomy of Land Speculation in Kenya Land speculation refers to buying land not for use, but to hold it until the price appreciates. It's widespread in areas like: Nanyuki: Once a pastoralist haven, now a checkerboard of idle gated plots. Kitengela and Joska: Transformed from community settlements into dusty subdivisions. Laikipia: Where wild animals are losing corridors to migration and survival. The Diaspora Factor Foreign ...