A few months ago, Thomas Klaffke’s newsletter (Creative Destruction) pointed me to this great article: Watching Millionaires. It argues we are mostly spending our time watching or listening to millionaires.
It is a very good piece, even though the marketer part of my brain immediately asks the question: are we really watching because they are millionaires, or are they millionaires because we are watching?
But apart from this small blind spot (or at least, unaddressed angle), it fits well with my core insights that time is attention.
The idea that time management is actually attention management is one of the core pillars of my upcoming book on strategic time management.
But the aformentioned article fed my thinking from a different angle, mostly because of its conclusion: why don’t we just start living instead?
If time spent equals attention spent, then attention spent equals life spent.
And, quite frankly, when we audit how we spend our attention, this insight hits hard.
Our attention is a battlefield, where deep pocketed giant corporations are fighting for it.
Their entire business model is based on the capture and monetization of our attention.
I decided to reframe them as life thieves. Maybe this reframe can help us fight for our cognitive sovereignty?
I now truly believe doom scrolling is a form of slow suicide.
If I let them capture my attention, they capture my time.
And as there is a limited amount of grains of sand in the hourglass that is my life, they are stealing my life.
Life thieves are real, but their work is so frictionless we barely notice it anymore. But they are as real as the pickpocket in the subway.