Notes from the Exit: Why I Left the Attention Economy

Photo by Andrew Guan on Unsplash

I didn’t leave the attention economy because I hated it. I left because I understood it, because once you see the system for what it is — a parasitic loop that rewards noise over nuance, metrics over meaning, reaction over reflection — you have two choices. Keep optimizing for reach, or start optimizing for resonance.

At some point, every creator hits a wall — it’s not burnout exactly. It’s misalignment. You find yourself fluent in a language you no longer believe in, you know how to hack the algorithm, when to post, what to say, how to craft the dopamine-hooked headline. You’ve learned to manufacture the kind of work that gets rewarded, but somewhere in the process you forget why you started making it at all.

The economy of attention doesn’t ask what you think; it asks how fast you can say it, how loud, and how often. And if you play long enough, you stop making anything for the people you care about and you start making it for the feed. The result is a race to the bottom with a leaderboard, a machine that needs to be fed even if it’s chewing up your integrity.

So I stopped. I didn’t ragequit. I didn’t issue a manifesto. I just started building a system that didn’t require me to sell my thoughts for spare change. I switched from social performance to sovereign publishing. I traded growth hacks for…