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 ...
It starts with a click. A friend forwards a link to a reading group, a chama, a Zoom workshop, a parenting circle. You join. You read a few messages. You mute the group. You never contribute. Never attend a session. Never show up. And you're not alone. Across Kenya—and perhaps globally—we are seeing a strange but widespread cultural habit: joining groups we never participate in . From WhatsApp reading clubs to civic forums to alumni communities, there’s a sea of people who are present but passive. It seems harmless… but it’s not. This article is a mirror to that quiet behavior—and an invitation to see what it’s really costing us. 1. The Silent Collapse of Collective Action Kenya has long depended on community-driven efforts: harambees, savings groups, cooperative societies, youth initiatives. But these only work when members participate. When 50 join but only 5 engage, things fall apart. Group admins burn out. Ideas die. Communities disband. And slowly, we stop be...