Consider these events:
1 – A guy inherits 100,000 dollars. He immediately flies to Vegas and loses it all in one night.
2 – A guy eats nothing but buckets of ice cream and gains 100 pounds of fat. Has a heart attack.
These are clearly bad choices.
How STUPID would you have to be? Right?
Because fucking up your finances and weight are social taboos. They impact status and mate selection. They downrank you. Subconsciously, they signal to the tribe, “Stay away from that guy.”
They can also be easily measured.
We can count them in simple numbers. Add up the dollars, add up the pounds.
Attention feels more abstract. So does wasting it.
People won’t criticize you much for what you pay attention to.
We behave as if we have an unlimited supply, that we can spend it on any low-value activity, and that it will fully regenerate at the start of each day.
But like everything else we have, our attention is finite.
Can we measure attention in terms of time? Sort of.
Check out this fact: instead of filling our lives with things we truly value, we scroll on social media for 5 hours a day.*
You might think: “Eh. Yeah, it’s not the best idea. But what are the obvious consequences, really? Don’t we all do that?”
Well. The most simpleton example: what if we converted that time into money we could have earned?
(Because hey, it’s okay to waste attention, but it’s a SIN to waste money!)
Imagine swiping your debit card for $7.25 (Federal minimum wage) every hour of scrolling. At the end of 30 days, after paying 150 times, you’ve spent $1,087.50.
That adds up to $13,050 a year: to scroll through advertisements and “content” you’ll forget about in five minutes.
Would you willingly pay that?
Again: How STUPID would you have to be?
(And that’s only calculated at the Federal minimum wage. Many of us could earn far more.)
Multiply that by EVERYONE, and you have a massive transfer of value. This is why Meta is worth $1.32 TRILLION.
Imagine the disgust with ourselves if social media companies were required to display a live tally at the top of the screen like this:
“Today You Lost: $85.61. Fuck You.”†
You could watch those digits roll by like an old-fashioned gas pump.‡
Ouch! Now, the attention we spend is concrete. Now it’s real.
Hello, opportunity cost.
“It costs you $1,000,000 per year to not know how to make $1,000,000 per year.”
-Alex Hormozi
Attention is not only finite. It’s exclusionary. What we focus our attention on also determines what we ignore. It shows what we value and don’t value. You can say you value something, but if you don’t spend non-trivial attention on it — and don’t choose it over other things — do you really?
Maybe we should stop scrolling on that bullshit and instead spend our scarce attention on our friends and family — who are infinitely more valuable than dollars.
(And will soon be gone.)
*I never want to hear the phrase: “I’m just so busy” again.
†Based on 3.42 hours of usage on a hypothetical $50,000/year salary. Imagine if it calculated how many POUNDS you gained using it instead of exercising, too. Uh-oh!
‡I’m old enough to remember paying for internet usage per minute. I used it for… um… looking up Black Sabbath lyrics. And when my bank account was emptied, I had to stop. We’d be better off going back to that model.