Earned or taken: paying attention to our attention

Something either has our attention or it doesn't. There's no in-between anymore, and the window for anything to pull us in gets shorter every day. Which leaves two ways for our attention to go: it's either earned, or it's taken. And earned feels like it's getting further away.

Brands figured this out years ago. It's why headlines exist, why ads hook you in the first three seconds, why everything in the grocery aisle is shouting 'High Protein'. Brands accepted that nobody gives their full attention anymore and redesigned everything around taking it.

But it's not just brands. It's us. Every conversation we have is competing with a notification, an unanswered text, a bad email, a half-thought about something else. Most of the time we don't notice how little attention we're giving, or how easily it's being taken, because we assume we're the ones choosing where it goes. I don't think we are. Not as often as we think.

Take my morning scroll. I wake up to turn off my alarm. Just the alarm. Five minutes later I'm watching someone build a log cabin in the woods in winter. I didn't decide to spend that attention. It was taken before I noticed. Ragebait, clickbait, doom-scrolling: none of it earns your attention, it just takes it. And the annoying part is that it works. You're three videos deep before you've clocked what happened. We all know this. We talk about screen time, dopamine, and algorithms constantly, then open the app anyway. Knowing about the attention economy doesn't opt you out of it.

And we're not only on the receiving end. Think about the effort that goes into a dating profile, a LinkedIn headshot, an Instagram photo dump. We're products in the attention economy too, optimising our packaging for someone else's scroll. I love Strava. It took running, a traditionally solo activity, and built a community around it. But a small confession: I've paused my watch at a red light, and I knew exactly what I was doing. Protecting my pace. At that moment the run stops being for me and starts being for whoever scrolls past my feed later, in the hopes of maxxing my kudos. Not inherently bad, but it shows we've started taking attention from each other too.

Here's the difference that matters. Some things take your attention before you've chosen to give it. Other things make you want to give it willingly. You can feel it. One leaves you feeling robbed. The other feels like time well spent.

I recently had an amateur Muay Thai fight. Hard to believe it's an experience I'll always remember, given I was getting punched in the face. But it demanded 100 per cent presence. My attention wasn't split, and that's what made it a lived experience rather than something that passed by. You feel it between people too. When someone gives you their full attention, you notice, because you're so used to it being taken or half-given that when it's fully offered it feels almost strange, but good. Earned attention between people has become rare enough to feel like a gift.

Brands can earn it too. Spotify Wrapped didn't take your attention, it reflected it back: here's who you are, based on where you spent it this year. Our generation's sorting hat. Attention that's earned is chosen, and chosen attention is what people remember. The experiences, the people, and the campaigns that stay with us are the ones we gave ourselves to willingly. The taken kind blurs into everything else.

I can't opt out of the attention economy and neither can you. But I've been trying to pay attention to my attention: noticing when it's being earned, when it's being taken, and how differently the two feel. Not a fix, but a start.

So, thinking about today: how much of your day did you choose, and how much was just taken?

Authors

By Jyron Calleja, Senior Consultant, Nature