I’m writing this with seventeen browser tabs open, three unread notifications on my phone, and the distinct feeling that I’ve forgotten something important. Which is to say: I’m writing this as a deeply compromised human being in 2025, exactly like you.
We’re all drowning in the same ocean of distraction, and somewhere along the way, we stopped calling it drowning and started calling it “staying informed.”
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately, and I promise you it’s not another productivity sermon from someone who wakes up at 4 am and drinks butter in their coffee. This is about something more fundamental. Something we’ve lost and desperately need to reclaim if we’re going to make anything of this strange moment in human history.
The Attention Economy Ate Our Brains
Let’s be honest about what’s happened to us. We live in the first era where billion-dollar corporations employ thousands of engineers whose entire job is to make you look at screens. Not to make your life better. Not to connect you more meaningfully with the people you love. To make you look at screens.
And it worked. Christ, did it work.
The average person now checks their phone 144 times per day. We’ve become human pinball machines, bouncing from notification to notification, mistaking the bright dings of manufactured urgency for actual importance. We’re Pavlov’s dogs, except the experiment never ends, and we’re the ones who built the bell.
I’m not above this. I’ve caught myself checking Twitter whilst literally holding a book I wanted to read. I’ve opened Instagram while waiting for a YouTube video to load. We’ve all become these fragmented, scattered versions of ourselves, and we’ve normalised it so completely that we barely notice anymore.
But here’s the thing that keeps me up at night: this isn’t just making us stressed or anxious or tired—though it’s absolutely doing all of that. It’s making us incapable of the very thing we need most right now.
Focus.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
I know, I know. Another think-piece about how phones are bad and we should all be more present. But hear me out, because I think we’re missing the bigger picture.
The crises facing humanity right now—climate collapse, democratic backsliding, rising authoritarianism, endemic loneliness, mental health emergencies, the breakdown of truth itself—none of these can be solved with distracted thinking. None of them.
These are complex, systemic problems that require sustained attention, deep thinking, and the ability to hold multiple ideas in your head simultaneously for longer than it takes to scroll past them. They require us to read difficult books, have uncomfortable conversations, sit with uncertainty, and think thoughts that take longer than a tweet to articulate.
But we’ve trained ourselves to be incapable of exactly this kind of thinking.
We’ve become very good at having opinions about everything and understanding nothing deeply. We’re a civilisation of Wikipedia-level experts on ten thousand topics, scrolling past the actual depth required to solve anything.
And the really insidious part? We think this makes us informed. We think keeping up with everything means we’re engaged citizens. But you can’t be genuinely engaged with anything when you’re simultaneously engaged with everything.
The Paradox of Choice Meets the Paradox of Everything
There’s a famous study about jam. When shoppers were presented with 24 varieties, only 3% bought anything. When presented with six varieties, 30% bought something. Too many choices paralysed decision-making.
Now apply that to modern life, where we’re not choosing between varieties of jam but between infinite varieties of everything. Every career path, every political issue, every global crisis, every hobby, every outrage, every opportunity—all of it demanding our attention simultaneously.
We’re not just paralysed. We’re fragmented into thousands of pieces, each piece trying to care about something different, none of them with enough weight to actually matter.
I see this in myself constantly. I care about climate change and housing policy and corporate corruption and digital rights and education reform and about seventeen other things, and the net result is that I’m not effectively doing anything about any of them. I’m just… aware. Constantly, exhaustingly aware.
But awareness without focus is just anxiety with a superiority complex.
What Focus Actually Looks Like
Real focus isn’t about productivity hacks or time management. It’s about something far more radical: choosing what not to care about.
This feels wrong, doesn’t it? We’ve been taught that good people care about everything. That if you’re not outraged about every injustice, heartbroken about every tragedy, and informed about every issue, you’re somehow failing at being human.
But this is a trap. A cruel one.
You cannot care about everything. Your brain literally doesn’t work that way. Your heart doesn’t work that way. When you try to care about everything equally, you end up caring about nothing effectively.
Focus means making the uncomfortable choice to let some things go. To accept that you cannot save every rainforest, cannot right every wrong, cannot be informed about every crisis. You have to choose.
And here’s the beautiful, terrifying truth: when you actually choose—when you focus your attention, your energy, your care on something specific—you become powerful. Not powerful in some corporate #hustle way, but powerful in that you can actually affect change in the real world.
The Things We Could Do
Imagine if everyone in your city chose one thing to genuinely focus on. Not to add to their list of concerns, but to actually focus on, to the exclusion of other things.
Some people focus on local housing. Some on education. Some on climate adaptation. Some on community building. Some on local journalism. Some on mental health services.
Now imagine they didn’t just “care” about these things in the vague, scroll-past-it sense. Imagine they actually got involved. Went to meetings. Learned the details. Built relationships. Stuck with it for years.
That city would transform in a decade.
But it requires the hardest thing we can do right now: focusing on less.
The Courage of Ignorance
I’ve started practising something I call “strategic ignorance,” which sounds terrible but feels necessary.
There are entire categories of news I no longer follow. In entire debates I’ve chosen not to have an opinion about. Entire crises I’ve accepted I cannot meaningfully contribute to solving.
This doesn’t make me a better person. It makes me a more honest one.
Because the alternative—the pretence that I can stay informed about everything, care about everything, have educated opinions about everything—that’s just ego dressed up as conscience. It’s the luxury of living in an age of information abundance, mistaking consumption for contribution.
Real contribution requires focus. And focus requires sacrifice.
I’m not suggesting we all become narrow-minded specialists who don’t care about the wider world. I’m suggesting we become people who care deeply about specific things rather than vaguely about everything.
What This Means for You
You need to choose.
Not what to add to your list of concerns, but what to remove. What to stop following. What to let go of. What to accept you cannot fix or solve or even stay informed about.
This will feel wrong. It will feel selfish. You’ll worry you’re becoming one of those people who “doesn’t care.” You’ll feel guilty every time something happens in the world that you’re not immediately informed about.
But here’s the thing: your guilt isn’t helping anyone. Your vague awareness of every global crisis isn’t solving anything. Your constant state of low-level outrage about everything isn’t making the world better.
What might make it better is if you chose something specific and actually did something about it. Not posted about it. Not stayed informed about it. Actually rolled up your sleeves and engaged with the messy, difficult, unsexy work of making one thing marginally better.
Maybe it’s your local school. Maybe it’s a food bank. Maybe it’s a community garden. Maybe it’s local politics. Maybe it’s a specific aspect of climate work. Maybe it’s helping one person learn to read.
The specifics matter less than the specificity itself.
The World Needs Focused Humans
We’re living through a period where everything is connected to everything else, where every problem is global, and where every crisis demands everyone’s attention.
And the perverse result is that we’re all paying attention to everything and changing nothing.
The world doesn’t need more people who are vaguely aware of all the problems. It needs people who are deeply engaged with specific solutions.
It needs you to stop trying to save everything and start trying to save something.
It needs you to focus.
I’m still working this out myself. I still have too many tabs open. I still check my phone too much. I still feel guilty about the things I’ve chosen not to focus on.
But I’m trying. I’m trying to be a person who does one thing well rather than a hundred things poorly. I’m trying to focus.
Because ultimately, that’s all any of us can do. We can choose where to direct this brief, strange, miraculous attention we’ve been given. We can choose to fragment it across everything or focus it on something.
The world is burning and drowning and breaking in a thousand different ways. But it always has been. And throughout history, it’s been changed by people who chose one thing and refused to be distracted.
Maybe that’s what we need now. Not more awareness. Not more outrage. Not more staying informed.
Just more focus.
And the courage to choose what we’re focusing on.
Until Next Time
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