flâneur

GLP-1s but for attention?

nanransohoff.substack.com · 810 words · saved by 1 readers

Humans have a finite amount of attention. At any given moment, we can focus on a limited number of things, there’s only so much time in a day, and there are only so many people in the world—about 130 billion hours of waking life each day. How we allocate that attention matters. We want to be humans, not zombies. To work on cool stuff, do things that haven’t been done before, read books, make things, love people around us, listen to them, and not have our mind snatched by a buzz against our thigh. And, famously, the competition for our attention is fierce—TV, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. Increasingly we see discussions of how there’s something vaguely cursed about the culture right now, and that feels related to everyone’s attention getting fracked. Said less spiritually, it just sucks to be addicted to stuff that doesn’t make you feel good. Most of us don’t really want to be scrolling TikTok or Twitter, but nonetheless the hours sometimes disappear. We’ve all lost days to ennui, so did

Humans have a finite amount of attention. At any given moment, we can focus on a limited number of things, there’s only so much time in a day, and there are only so many people in the world—about 130 billion hours of waking life each day. How we allocate that attention matters. We want to be humans, not zombies. To work on cool stuff, do things that haven’t been done before, read books, make things, love people around us, listen to them, and not have our mind snatched by a buzz against our thigh. And, famously, the competition for our attention is fierce—TV, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter.…

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