On the attention tax, and who's collecting.

I once tried to make a list of everything that wanted my attention on a single Tuesday morning. I gave up after forty-seven items, and I had not yet left the house. Some of them I had asked for. Most of them I had not.

We talk about the attention economy as if it were a single industry — TikTok, Instagram, the algorithmic feed. But the attention economy is, more accurately, a tax system. There are many collectors. They do not coordinate. They are all very good at their jobs.

The big ones bill you in obvious ways. The medium ones — your work Slack, the chat app you opted into, the third-party newsletter you signed up for in 2019 — bill you in less obvious ways. The small ones are the ones that surprised me. The lock screen of the appliance in my kitchen. The pop-up on the parking meter app. The default-on notifications of a banking application that has no reason to ever speak to me.

Every notification is a small loan you didn't agree to. The interest accrues whether you read it or not.

The economic metaphor matters because it forces a question: what do you owe? The honest answer, for most of these collectors, is nothing. Nothing at all. I have started saying this out loud to myself when a notification fires. I do not owe you anything. Then I turn it off.

This is not a wellness essay. I am not suggesting you delete your apps. I am suggesting that you make a budget, the way you would make a budget for any other thing the world tries to take from you. Decide who you pay attention to, in what amounts, on what schedule. Make every other collector ask twice.

The attention economy collects whether or not you notice. That is the trick of it. The remedy is to notice.