Your Attention is Worth More Than Money
Why companies are fighting for the one resource you can't get back
You opened Instagram for five seconds to check one thing. Somehow thirty minutes disappeared. You don’t remember what you saw. You don’t remember what you were looking for. You just remember the vague feeling of having been somewhere else, watching other people’s carefully edited lives scroll past while yours sat waiting.
How much would you pay for those thirty minutes back?
The question doesn’t make sense because you can’t buy time back. But if you can’t buy it back, why did you give it away for free?
Every tech company on earth knows that your attention isn’t just valuable. It’s the most valuable resource in the modern economy, because attention is the only thing that can’t be manufactured, can’t be scaled, can’t be replaced by automation or AI. There are only so many hours in a human day. Only so much awareness available to be directed at anything. This scarcity makes attention more valuable than gold, more sought-after than any physical commodity.
And you’re giving it away every time …