The Attention Economy is Optimized Against You
The system trains you to care just enough to feel overwhelmed, but not enough to do anything about it.
You scroll past a Gaza headline. A few swipes down, an AI slop of a gorilla vlogging is life. You double-tap the slop. A minute later, you barely remember the war. But this isn’t just a personal failing or emotional burnout. It’s the architecture working as designed. We call it “compassion fatigue” or “information overload” — as if the human brain is the problem. As if it’s your fault for being too tired to care.
Modern tech increases the volume of information and rewires how we relate to suffering by keeping us constantly exposed and never grounded.
Empathy becomes volatility. Attention becomes transaction. The platforms don’t care if you cry, laugh, rage, or scroll blankly — as long as you keep scrolling. So we mistake moral exhaustion for civic engagement.
We’re told the answer is balance: meditate, read Nussbaum, log off occasionally. But the deeper drift is this: our attentional sovereignty isn’t being lost. It’s being monetized. And the system runs better when we go numb.
Start with the incentive: time-on-site. Everything else — your emotions, outrage, attention span — is secondary to that metric. The more unpredictable the feed, the more it keeps you hooked. So, Facebook shows you a refugee camp and then a meme. A bombing, then brunch. It’s not randomness. It’s design.
But the real damage is the moral confusion it breeds.
In classical ethics, attention is the gateway to judgment. You can’t respond to what you don’t see. But what happens when you’re trained to glance, not look? To flinch away, not absorb?
Politicians flood the zone with noise. Platforms flatten tragedy into just another post. The user adapts—not by resisting, but by coping. Tonglen meditation becomes a life hack. “News fatigue” becomes a diagnosis. But no one asks: What kind of society needs therapy just to notice its own crises?
What’s sold as balance is often retreat. What’s framed as wellness is often self-preservation, from a system that benefits when your only reaction to injustice is emotional exhaustion, followed by silence.
And so the feed loops on.
The more aware you are, the less capable you feel, the more emotionally attuned and overwhelmed. You’re encouraged to care — but not for too long. Feel, but don’t act. Grieve, but don’t organize.
The contradiction is systemic. You’re told that attentional sovereignty is yours to reclaim, but no one mentions that sovereignty implies power. And this system was built to keep you reactive, not sovereign.
Don’t just reclaim your attention. Audit it.
Who earns when you engage? Who wins when you retreat? Don’t assume the answer is always balanced.
Sometimes, the moral act isn’t to withdraw, it’s to resist being gamed. The capacity for compassion isn’t a bug. It’s a signal. And if it burns out, it means you were paying attention to something real, just not in a world built to support it.
Start there—not with self-optimization but with refusal. Choose where to look, and just as importantly, choose not to look away.