The Value of Your Attention
Numerous times on this blog I’ve advocated for keeping an attention budget. We live in the information age. Most of what we perceive is virtual, digital, and image-oriented, even down to the way people present themselves. Information is easier to access than ever before. As a result, your attention is more valuable than ever before.
Why is this, exactly? Well, something of human value only acquires value in the human realm. Money as an object has no value in and of itself, but in lawfully agreeing to assign money value, we create a system of currency that is used to exchange goods and services. Attention is similar. Outside of basic survival, your attention doesn’t have any quantifiable value— until you begin interacting with other humans, that is.
As the world of advertising and marketing has taught us, attention is a valuable commodity. Advertisers spend billions of dollars every day trying to direct your gaze towards their clients. They compete with one another to appeal to deeper and deeper instincts on more and more nuanced levels, to the point that many people don’t even know that their attention is being bought and sold on a marketplace. The more individualized you believe to be, the more unique of a product you are to be bought and sold on the informational marketplace.
When I first began studying advertising, I found this deeply disturbing. That’s because it is disturbing; it only confirms one’s cynical suspicions that the world operates on the great faulty axis of the lowest common denominator. Democracy is the great leveler; the mediocre average is what passes the vote, and so it is raised to a position of great power. Advertisers capitalize on this, catering to the largest audience possible. Your gaze can now be quantified in thousands of infinitesimal little ways— age, race, spending habits, education, political beliefs, number of friends, likelihood of going out on a Friday night, etc. All of these behaviors can be tracked and assigned a numerical value. If you ever want to confirm this, create an advertiser account on Facebook. Create a custom audience. You can fine-tune it down to a few thousand people out of a billion. And you can sell stuff to them.
Why am I going on and on about this? To illustrate the value of your attention. If your mere presence and contemplation can be bought and sold on a marketplace, you would be smart to make sure you optimize both the supply side and the demand side.
The supply side of your information value is the quality of information you take in. Do you spend your leisure time watching porn, playing video games, and buying new clothes? If this is your lifestyle, your information digestion has a high potential value for advertisers, but not much value for yourself, since you are giving your time away in exchange for base pleasures. Do you spend your leisure time reading books, exercising, saving money, and participating in interesting discussions? Your attention likely has less value to advertisers than someone who is more of a consumer, but more value for you, since you convert your time into real tangible value— financial security, health, wisdom, social acumen.
This sounds like a simplification of attention, but equally simple is the fact that people who do use the internet spend much or most of their time on it, especially young people. These statistics will only increase over time. A class of mindless consumers will continue to grow, as it always does, but from this mass a mindful subsection of people has emerged. It will continue to grow.
Right now, I have your attention. You don’t have to pay for me to have your attention since, luckily, I do this for fun. I also don’t have any advertisers, so your attention is directed purely towards these words, and perhaps also the platforms of Twitter and Medium, which I have chosen to use to spread this stuff. These are five minutes you could technically have spent doing anything else, but you chose to spend them reading this. Thanks. Keeping your own attention budget helps you recognize things like this. 20 minutes spent oversleeping every day won’t get you very far, for example, but 20 minutes spent meditating will completely change your life. In my opinion, 5 minutes spent reading “23 Cats Who Look Like Potatoes” on Buzzfeed is less valuable than spending 5 minutes reading this article, if for no other reason than this article attempts to remind you to stay alert. The choice is yours, dear reader. Do I still have your attention?
Before wrapping this up, let’s revert back to simple economics— you have a limited supply of time on this Earth. The demand for your attention varies, but it’s always there. If you’re intelligent about how you allocate your time, you can provide yourself with accumulating value in the form of knowledge, mindfulness, and gratitude— an investment. If not, you risk your attention becoming dumber, less articulate, less mindful, and more prone to ignorance, deception, and indulgence— like debt or mindless spending.
This hit me like a brick the first time I thought about it. If you can cultivate mindfulness and redirect your attention towards things that provide you with value, you counteract the whole harmful system of cultural dumbing down that occurs in the sphere of mass consumption. This is a sphere of mediocrity that more and more people are drawn into as the world becomes more globalized and democratized. When you rise above this and take your attention back into your own hands, you become, by definition, extra-ordinary and above-average. The more you reflect on the process by which your attention is bought and sold, the more you recognize which of your activities provide you with value. You can work towards doing more of these activities, saving time and value for yourself and those you love rather than giving it away.
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