Last night I went to a concert (Theo Katzman - check him out. He's wicked talented). It was one of those sold-out shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco where the audience is made up almost entirely of true fans. I took a few moments to look to my left and right during the show and found myself smiling at all the upturned faces, their owners completely plugged into the performance. People were singing along. The crowd actually got quiet for the quiet vocal performance songs. People were locked in for the guitar and bass solos, even allowing themselves to do bass-face/guitar-face in public as they felt the groove. In other words, the artist really had our attention. The artist had our full attention, given willingly, and I'm confident the majority of us in that audience would say it was attention well spent.

It strikes me as peculiar that we are not more judicious than we are when it comes to how we allocate our attention. In the case of the concert, the artist had to earn it. Pretty much everyone who came to the show had come specifically to see him perform. They thought about it in advance, purchased a ticket, and opted to wait in line to go through the metal detectors out front to get into the show. The audience members made a well informed, conscious, pre-meditated decision to allocate two hours worth of their life's attention to the show. Yet, I would argue that that degree of deliberation is relatively unusual when it comes to how we typically spend our hours of consciousness. How many minutes a day do you spend mindlessly scrolling on social media, tumbling down a Youtube rabbit hole or getting emotionally fired up over a headline you saw in the news? For many of us, the number has grown substantially of late.

If we optimistically assume that we're going to live to be about 80 years old and we lie to ourselves a bit and assume that we're going to get an average of 8 hours of sleep per night, that means we'll have roughly 27.6 million minutes of attention to allocate during our lifetimes. If you're spending an hour of your daily attention on social media (whether cumulatively or in one big binge), that adds up quickly. Let's assume you had wise parents who didn't let you have "screen time" until you turned 15. If you then averaged an hour or so a day to scrolling on social media, you will have given away 5% of your life's total waking attention by the time you're on your death bed at 80. Does 5% sound like a relatively small number? well, keep in mind that that's the equivalent of FIVE FULL YEARS! Five full years where each of the 16 hours spent awake each day is given up to helping Mark Zuckerberg sell ads.

My intent is not to make a statement specifically about social media in our society--for the purposes of this thought experiment, you could easily swap social media scrolling time with a variety of other equally unproductive attention sinks such as laying in bed catastrophizing about things outside our control, watching reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond because it just so happened to be playing when you turned on the TV, etc. Rather, what I'm trying to get at is the disparity between how protective we are of our attention relative to how we protect other aspects of our lives. In some U.S. states, it's completely legal to shoot and kill someone for trespassing on your property. If someone managed to steal some of our money, we could take them to court and they might well see jail time. What if someone deliberately punched you and caused you to fall and scrape your knees? You'd be pretty mad, right? But what about when the product managers at Facebook make a decision to ramp up their algorithmic recommendation of divisive, dopamine releasing click-bait and successfully capture more minutes of your attention? Good on them and congrats to their shareholders for what the ad revenue induced boost to the stock price! We just don't seem to view our meager allocation of consciousness as something as sacred as our money, property, or other aspects of our physical wellbeing.

Yet our consciousness in the present moment really is all we truly have. None of us will leave behind any unspent minutes of consciousness when we slip away on our death beds at age 80. I hope that we will see advances in technology that allow us to break free from the perverse incentives of the advertising model, but I suspect things may get worse before they get better. In the meantime, we should all raise our standards for the price of our attention. Our attention is sacred. I'm all for people making money by capturing our attention but it should be justly earned.