Attention - (ENG)

When we look at our lives or make plans about our future, our brain gives us a sense of control over what we choose.

But our attention is weak. Like an animal in front of a trap, it falls again and again for the same tricks. The happiest and most productive people I know are obsessed with this topic. The rest live on "autopilot."

I'd like to make an analogy. There are many people (men, generally) really into the world of finance and cryptocurrencies who spend many hours thinking about these topics and who get pissed when someone doesn't care about getting returns on their savings: "what??? you have your money sitting there??? don't you know you're losing money???"

I don't really care how people manage their personal finances, but I am very pissed when people don't value their attention. It's the most important thing we have! If you believe that the most valuable thing is our lifetime (and not so much the wealth we're able to accumulate), we're in the same boat.

Let's do an exercise. Imagine a world without digital screens (for example, an 18th-century scenario); the things that can steal our attention are probably reduced to other people or animals that depend on us. If we go further and imagine an isolated person, in a cabin in the woods or a monastic cell, there are really few things that can steal our attention beyond our own stream of consciousness (which is no small thing). This world without screens or people is strangely plannable.

The offensive of the digital device (with a complex organization behind it) is precisely this: to imitate the signals that traditionally made us pay attention.

Before, it was other people who really needed us. Now they are manufactured illusions to extract value from us. We are vulnerable because evolutionarily it makes sense that important things steal our attention. Other people often need us, it's true. But not THAT often.

The advertising industry and all contemporary practices of "getting seen" out there have found in this perverse mechanism a way to optimize and technify themselves. They have turned our attention into their most profitable battlefield.

We often behave like companies with bad culture: unable to change because we have reached slow and demotivating inertias.

Not everyone has the same margin to escape this inertia; there is an undeniable component of privilege in the ability to decide about one's own life. But even with all the privileges in the world, there is a mechanism that affects us all: inertia is not neutral.

It closes the hopeful lines of flight (the changes you need and projects you care about) but leaves distractions wide open. This is the attention trap: it's not a zero-sum game. When you lose control, you don't lose everything equally. You lose the ability to do good things (plan, grow, change), but you maintain the ability to consume distractions.

It's a perverse filter: it blocks what you need but lets through what harms you. Life on autopilot closes the lines of flight. But it doesn't close Instagram.

Here I'm in the same boat as the advocates of meditation and 'mindfulness.'

The reality is that, more than ever, there is a magnificent opportunity to reclaim our most precious asset: the 24 hours of the day. This statement will sound powerful to people hungry for life and will leave pure brainrots indifferent.

Attention is an asset at the same level as our body, our time, and our identity. I'm not referring to maximizing our productive time but rather the opposite: actively deciding when we are not productive and in what ways we don't want to be.

It's an evolutionary mechanism that has become counterproductive: the same mechanism that was supposed to filter out the irrelevant now filters precisely what we need.

I think it's a good idea to (1) get a quantitative sense of how many hours per week we spend on activities we don't want to do (like doomscrolling) and (2) take measures to focus on activities that make us happy.

To track where I spend my time I use Android's integrated Digital Wellbeing and the Screen Time Tracker app. My "infrastructure" against distraction includes Simple Time, One Sec, Forest, Notion, and the largest possible volume of content on paper like notebooks and books.