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 ...
In Kenya , we were taught to believe that experience is gold. That if you worked long enough, if you collected enough years, your value would automatically rise. That the job market would respect you for the battles you have fought, the places you have served, the mistakes you have endured. But last week, I sat in interviews that shook that belief to its core. Men and women with 5, 8, even 10 years of experience walked in, clutching their resumes with pride, only to accept salaries that would barely pay their children’s school fees . People who had returned from abroad, with exposure and networks, nodding quietly as they were offered wages not too far from what a fresh graduate could expect. It wasn’t just one or two candidates. It was a pattern. Experience Is Not Currency Here We love to tell young people, “get experience first, then the money will come.” But what happens when the money doesn’t come? What happens when you realize that in the Kenyan market — especially in certain...