What is wealth when attention has become the most valuable commodity? Because if it’s true that we’re living in an attention economy, doesn’t that make the ones still able to safeguard their minds the most prosperous of them all?
Your attention, and thus your mind, is perhaps the most precious thing you’ll ever have. No matter what anyone tells you, the quality of your mind is one of the biggest factors that determines and shapes the way you live out your time on this planet.
Compared to the pre-Internet era, it’s becoming increasingly harder to protect your mind. Nowadays, you have to shield yourself from giant tech companies that are maliciously preying on your attention whenever you go online.
With many of the most recent advancements in technology, they become better and better at hacking not only your brain, but also the collective unconscious of entire societies. It’s kind of like propaganda on steroids, joyfully spoonfed en masse.
A bloated mind, from the cradle to the grave
The sad reality is that whatever used to be normal – such as growing up and shaping your mind by yourself, your direct culture and worldly experience – is now increasingly becoming a luxury.
Babies are hushed into silence by having an iPad placed in their strollers. Kids of 5 are seeing their millennial parents glued to their screens. 12-year-olds are prone to TikTok addiction, and 18-year-olds can see more pornographic images in one day than somebody pre-Internet era could ever see in their entire lifetime.
Young adults are increasingly antisocial due to information fatigue and polarisation, no matter what political spectrum you’re on. To top it off, Artificial Intelligence is only just warming up, and it’s already changing the very fabric of society.
Whereas most technological advancements once served to make our lives easier, the opposite is true for most (but not all) recent inventions, making the world more Kafkaesque by the day.
Unfortunately, this has become the “new normal”, ingrained in our everyday lives, whether we like it or not. So what’s to be done about it? It starts with understanding that…
…you are what you put your mind to; you’re also what you put into your mind.
Putting this realization into practice is the difficult part, but it becomes easier once you can see your mind as something you can train like a muscle.
The key here is to really visualize your mind as this physical, moldable, and personal thing that you own. This vulnerable thing of yours is all you have ever been, and you don’t want to handle it poorly, nor would you ever want to give it away entirely (which is exactly what we’re doing when we’re scrolling on socials)
I’d say you want to nurture it, protect it, and take care of it. That means that instead of feeding it junk information, nourish it with good, healthy, and nutritious information. Not too much, not too little.
Surround yourself with things and people whose minds make your mind flourish, and remove the factors that unnecessarily degrade the quality of your mind.
So, what makes your mind flourish?
This, I think, is the milla-dolla question: What are the things that make your mind flourish? This is a very personal matter: you’re the only one who can answer that for yourself.
In my case, it is to slow down and allow the mind all the time in the world to observe itself and other people’s minds, free of noise or distraction.
My mind flourishes when I feel that I’m doing meaningful work, or when my mind can enjoy writings, music, or film that’s created by other well-nourished minds.
It flourishes when conversing with others who are able to articulate their minds in full honesty and sincerity.
It flourishes when I match my life’s day-to-day pace to the pace of my mind, allowing it to unfold and discover, grow, and create.
Living this way is not an easy task by any means. It requires a conscious effort every day, since distraction is all around us, all the time, and it’s become the normal status quo to lose your mind to junk information or brainrot slop.
To make that conscious choice every single day is a choice that I’m happy to make. The grim alternative, sadly enough, is to allow entire skyscrapers filled with talented people to rob me of my attention, groom my subconsciousness, hack into my brain, and steal my mind.
When this happens, we risk being numbed into mindless consumerism and further screen addiction.
The challenge of a lifetime
Ultimately, this is what accounts for maybe the greatest challenge of our time: to stay diligent and take delight in nurturing the mind, instead of giving it away to mind-numbing, misaligned big tech and its algorithms.
Hereby, I’d like to invite you to find your ways of safeguarding, nurturing, and caring for your precious mind. But alas, reading this article and letting the thought marinate is easy to do. Putting it into practice is the hard part, but nonetheless very doable (and so, so worth it).
It starts with embracing the fact that your mind and its attention are the most precious things you might have, that only an autonomous mind is capable of existential courage, and you should safeguard it with your life…
…because in the end, it’s all you really have.
