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’s a kind of grief we rarely speak about in Kenya—the grief that comes not from loss, but from survival. Many Kenyans know what it’s like to give up entire decades of their lives for the sake of family. We raise children who aren’t ours. We care for ageing, ailing parents when healthcare fails. We build homes from scratch while still repaying loans. We battle court cases over family land, support siblings through school, and somehow still show up to work, church, harambees, and funerals with a smile. We are excellent at pushing through pain. We endure. We provide. We hold everything together. And so we often tell ourselves: “I’ll rest when I’m done.” But what if done never comes? Even after the chaos ends—the illness, the debt, the heartbreak—we don’t rest. We move the goalpost. We chase another opportunity. We dream of new lands and new starts. We keep running, because stillness feels foreign. We are a nation that knows how to hustle, how to survive—but we don’t know how t...