Your Attention Isn’t Collapsing, It’s Being Raided.
The cursor blinked, an accusation. Three paragraphs. That’s all I had managed in 43 minutes, and yet the blank expanse of the document felt miles away, obscured by a dozen open tabs. An email banner pulsed in the corner, a Slack notification chimed, and somewhere, faintly, my phone vibrated with a message I knew I didn’t need to see. This isn’t a scene from a dystopian novel; it’s Tuesday, and it’s likely your Tuesday, too.
We’ve been fed a story, haven’t we? A relentless narrative that our attention spans are wilting, that we, as individuals, are failing to keep pace with the demands of a hyper-connected world. We pathologize our inability to focus, labeling it a personal failing, a lack of discipline, or worse, a genuine neurological deficit like ADHD, as if the entire global population suddenly developed a new condition in the last three decades. But what if the problem isn’t with us, but with the very environment we’re forced to navigate? What if our attention isn’t collapsing, but is instead being actively raided, a resource plundered for profit by an ecosystem specifically engineered to fracture it?
The Raided Landscape
I remember vividly attempting a new productivity method last summer, a rigid time-blocking schedule that promised unparalleled focus. For a while, it felt revolutionary. I’d set a timer for 53 minutes, close everything, and dive deep. The first few days, I felt like a titan. By week three, the external world had




