The Attention Resistance
If you take a look at our modern economy and track where the money is going you’ll realize something interesting, that consumers aren’t paying the big 4 companies (apple, amazon, google, Facebook) directly. We, the consumers, don’t fork over money to use these platforms, we pay with our attention.
Thus we can conclude that attention is our most valuable resource. Advertisers know that if they have our attention then they have our money which is why advertising is a 560 billion dollar per year industry (over 3x the size of the oil industry). Attention is literally more valuable than oil, yet the average consumer gives their attention away like its a renewable resource. When we lack constraints, we numb ourselves with distraction. By not understanding our values and where we’re headed we can easily go off the tracks. David Perrell noted in his article Attention Deficit that we should “Think freedom in constraints, not freedom from constraints.” If we let our hedonistic brains run amuck then they’ll end up choosing the most rewarding, dopamine-filled distractions.
Social media apps have been designed to capture and retain our attention. These corporations are pouring billions of dollars into figuring out how to make these apps as addicting as possible. Tristan Harris compares our phones to slot machines. The reasons are because they follow the same concept of intermittent positive reinforcement, which means that unpredictable rewards release more dopamine than predictable ones.
Where Tristan Harris is questioning the very economic incentives and structure behind this system to create change, Cal Newport has been taking a more personal approach. He’s helping people practice Digital Minimalism and limit the amount of time they spend online, thus the Attention Resistance.
If we want to grow in the aspects of our life that matter to us we need to be more intentional with how we spend our time online, given that there are hours of time to be gained every single day, we could be using our time for more valuable projects and attention then mindlessly scrolling through our social media feeds and looking at memes and sensationalized content.
Think about it this way “you can’t build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.”
For starters, here are a few ways to rethink how you spend your time and attention.
- Treat your time and attention as sacred. If someone asked us for $20, they’d need a good reason. And yet we so easily give away 20 minutes of our time to any and every distraction online. You cannot earn more time
- Train your mind. Practice mindfulness meditation daily. Learn to hold your focus.
- Don’t click like: doing so reinforces the idea in your mind that a binary like/disklike is enough feedback to take the place of real human interaction. Conversations involve thousands of cues and subtle communications that a like button cannot replace
- Take a Digital Fast: which might look like a 15 to 30-day break from technology to figure out what you truly value and what you chase just because it feels good
- Spend time alone: With today’s 24/7 connected social networks we don’t have a second in the day to think for ourselves. We’re being inundated with other people’s ideas that we don’t even know what our own are anymore. So practice the timeless act of solitude.
It’s about putting tools to work on behalf of the things you value most, and then ignoring the distractions that don’t clear this high bar.
If you’re interested in learning more, here are some of the resources I found most valuable in writing this article:
