Your Attention Is the Most Valuable Thing You Own, So Stop Giving It Away

Here is a sentence that would have baffled every generation before ours: the most common way to spend an evening is to hold a glass rectangle six inches from your face and be mildly annoyed by it. Nobody ordered this. Nobody voted on it. And somehow, at 11:40 at night, there you are, one more swipe from a bed you meant to be in an hour ago.

Let me tell you what is going on, folks, because it is not a mystery and it is not an accident. It is a business plan. And the thing being bought and sold in that business plan is the one asset you cannot make more of: the hours of your waking life.

I want to make this argument in order, because it deserves order. First the definitions, then the mechanism, then the premises, then the best objection I know, and then a verdict. If you disagree at the end, you will at least know exactly which step you disagree with.

What I mean by attention

Attention is the faculty by which you decide what in the world is worth noticing and for how long. That is all. It is not a mood and it is not a vague wellness word. It is the thing you spend when you read a page, hear your child's story, finish a task or say a prayer. You get a fixed supply of it each day, it cannot be saved, and when it is gone you do not get it back until you sleep.

Economists have understood the basic point for a long time. The scholar Herbert Simon observed in the early 1970s that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. When information was scarce, the problem was finding it. When information is endless, the problem is deciding what to ignore. Notice what that does to the economics: the scarce thing is no longer the content. The scarce thing is you.

A value claim comes next, and I will say plainly that it is a value claim and not a fact. A free person is one who is able to direct his own life toward ends he has chosen. That is the old meaning of liberty in the Western tradition, from the Hebrew Scriptures through the Founders. It is more than the absence of a policeman at your door. It includes the inner capacity to say no to an impulse and yes to a duty. I stand on that value. If you do not hold it, the rest of this column will not move you. If you do, I think it moves you a long way.

How a free app is paid for

The mechanism first, in plain terms, with no conspiracy required.

A great many of the most-used apps and sites charge nothing to the user. They still cost money to build and run, and their owners still intend to profit. The money comes from advertisers, who pay for the chance to put a message in front of a person. The more time people spend on the service, the more messages can be shown and the more finely the advertiser can target them. So the revenue of the platform rises with the minutes you spend on it.

Now follow that one step further than its defenders like to follow it. If revenue rises with your minutes, then the people who run the product have a standing, rational, daily reason to find new ways to take more of your minutes. Not to serve you better. To hold you longer. Those two goals sometimes overlap and often do not. A tool that solved your problem in thirty seconds and let you go would be a failure by this measure. A tool that took forty minutes and left you feeling a little worse would be a triumph.

I am not claiming anyone in that business is a villain. I am claiming that they are doing precisely what their incentives instruct, and that the incentive points away from your interests. When a store's profit comes from the hours you stay in the store and not from what you buy, you should expect the store to have no clocks and no windows. Casinos figured that out long ago. The only new thing is that the casino now fits in your pocket and follows you to the dinner table.

The design features, named plainly

The incentive would be harmless if nothing could be done about it. Something can. Product teams measure what makes people come back and stay, and they build more of it. You can name the features without any inside knowledge, because you meet them every day.

• The endless scroll. A page with a bottom gives you a natural place to stop. A feed with no bottom gives you none. The decision to quit, which used to be made for you by the end of the thing, now has to be made by you, over and over, at the weakest moment.
• Autoplay. The next video starts before you have decided you want another one. Inertia is the default, and the default is always the choice the owner prefers.
• The notification. A buzz, a badge, a red dot. Each one is a small summons, and each one interrupts whatever you were doing.
• The pull to refresh. You drag the screen down, and it may or may not produce something new. That uncertainty matters. The psychologist B. F. Skinner showed in the twentieth century that rewards delivered unpredictably hold behavior more stubbornly than rewards delivered on a schedule. That is the logic of the slot machine, and a feed you refresh by pulling a lever is a lever.
• Likes and counts. Your friend's reaction to your photo is converted to a number, and a number invites you to check it.

None of these is evil by itself. Together, built and tested by very smart people whose pay depends on the result, they are a machine tuned to one purpose. The honest way to describe your phone, in many of its most used apps, is that it is a machine for turning your attention into someone else's revenue.

Six premises

Now the argument, as I promised, in order.

1. Attention is the raw material of a self-governed life. You cannot choose a vocation, keep a promise, raise a child or form a considered opinion about a vote without sustained attention. Everything you will ever be proud of took hours of it.
2. Attention is finite and cannot be stored. The day has the hours it has. Whatever one thing takes, another thing loses. Ask any saver what a fixed budget does to a person, and then read Give Every Dollar a Job Before the Month Starts, the Zero-Based Budget with your hours in place of your dollars.
3. A large part of the digital economy is paid by the minute of your attention. That is a statement about how the revenue works, and the platforms themselves describe it in their own filings to investors.
4. Firms in that economy have strong, legitimate-looking reasons to engineer products that capture more of it, and they have the data and the talent to succeed.
5. A person who cannot direct his own attention cannot direct his own life. He is steered by whatever pulled last.
6. Therefore a free people has a duty, first to itself, to reclaim command of its attention. Not by law. By habit.

Notice the shape of that conclusion. I am not asking for a federal Department of Staring at Walls. I am asking you to treat your attention the way you already treat your wallet. You would not hand a stranger your debit card and walk away. You hand over your evening every night, for free, to a stranger with a spreadsheet.

Older wisdom had a word for this

Folks, we did not discover this problem. We rediscovered it. The oldest traditions in the West built a defense against exactly this kind of capture, and they built it into the calendar.

The Fourth Commandment, in Exodus 20, says to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy: six days you labor, and the seventh is a rest. Genesis 2 gives the pattern, with God resting on the seventh day. Deuteronomy 5 repeats the commandment and ties it to the memory of slavery in Egypt, which tells you something. A Sabbath is first of all a statement that you are not a slave. A slave has no day that is his own. A free man does. Rest, in that tradition, is an act of freedom, and a weekly practice of letting no one and nothing claim your whole attention. You can read more of the long argument in The Sabbath is the oldest labor protection on record, so why do we mock it?.

The Christian tradition kept the rhythm, shifting it to Sunday, and built the monastery around hours of prayer and silence. The Benedictine rule is famous for its balance of work, prayer and reading.

Closer to home, many American families remember a quieter Sunday: the big meal, the long afternoon, the porch, the walk, the visit. Whatever your own faith, the structure was wise. It carved out a stretch of time that no employer, no merchant and no screen was allowed to enter.

What it costs

You do not need a study to know the costs; you need an honest week. Look at four places.

Work. Anyone who does serious work knows that the hard part of any real task is the first stretch of uninterrupted concentration. A notification does not merely cost the ten seconds it takes to read. It costs the thread you were holding, and the thread takes minutes to pick back up. A day chopped into slivers produces busy people who finish little.

Reading. A book is the most demanding and most rewarding thing a person does with his attention, and it is the first casualty of a pocket full of easier things. The habit of reading a whole argument, from the first page to the last, is how citizens learn to follow a chain of reasoning, and it does not survive on scraps. The skill is a muscle, and the ones you do not use are the ones you lose.

Family conversation. Picture a family in Ohio at dinner on a Tuesday. Four people, one table, four screens face down that are not really face down because every eye keeps wandering to them. Nobody was rude. Nobody said a word about it. But the conversation that would have wandered, as good conversation does, into a story about a teacher or a worry about a friend, never started, because starting takes a sustained, unhurried attention that nobody offered. That is a hypothetical, but I would bet you can fill in the faces yourself. A household is built out of such conversations. A republic is built out of households.

Citizenship. The man who cannot sit through a long article gets his politics from a caption, and he is easy to mislead, by either party.

The objection, stated fairly

Now the best objection, and it deserves a fair statement, because it comes from people who love liberty as much as I do.

The libertarian says: these are adults. They know what they are doing. Each person chose to download the app and each person can delete it. A free society does not appoint itself the nanny of grown men and women. If I want to spend my evenings on a feed, that is my business, and a regulator who decides otherwise is a bigger threat to my freedom than any algorithm. John Stuart Mill made the classic version of the case in On Liberty in 1859: the only purpose for which power can rightly be used against a member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. A man's own good, Mill said, is not sufficient warrant.

I agree with the first half of that completely. I am not asking Congress to do anything about your evening. A federal bureaucracy deciding how many minutes a free adult may scroll would be an offense against the Tenth Amendment's spirit, against the dignity of the citizen and against plain common sense.

Here is where I part from the objection, in three points.

One, the objection treats choice as a single event. You did choose to download the app, once, on one afternoon. But the thing you are being asked to resist is not one choice. It is ten thousand micro-decisions, made at moments of fatigue, against a system designed by specialists to win those moments. The person who says "just use willpower" is describing a fair fight, and it is not one.

Two, freedom from interference is not the whole of freedom. The tradition I stand in, running from Athens and Jerusalem through the Founders, holds that liberty is also self-rule: the capacity to govern yourself. A man who is free from the law and a slave to every impulse is not free. He has moved the tyrant from outside the house to inside it.

Three, and this is the point that answers the libertarian on his own ground: the proper response to a threat to self-command is more self-command, not more government. I am asking for exactly what the libertarian praises, the individual taking responsibility. Self-government starts with self-command. It always did.

The Founders understood this. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 55 that republican government presupposes the existence of the higher human qualities, more than any other form of government does. In other words, a republic is the most demanding system ever devised, because it asks ordinary people to run themselves. John Adams, in an address to the militia of Massachusetts in 1798, said that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to the government of any other. You do not need to agree with Adams about everything to see his logic. If the people cannot govern themselves, no parchment will govern them for long. You can see the Founders' texts for yourself on the Constitution page.

What a sensible person does about it

Folks, you do not have to throw your phone into a lake. The point of this argument is not that technology is bad. The telephone, the printing press and the pocket library are miracles. The point is that you should be the one holding the leash.

Here is a short, boring and effective list, offered as general common sense and not as an expert prescription.

• Turn off nearly every notification. Keep the ones from actual people who need you, a call or a text from family, and kill the rest. If something is truly urgent, a person will call.
• Give the phone a bed of its own. Charge it outside the bedroom. Buy an alarm clock. It costs less than a pizza and returns your first and last hour of the day. I walk through the whole household version in A Family Phone Plan That Puts Dinner, Sleep and Sunday Back on the Calendar.
• Take back one meal. Pick dinner. No screens at the table, for anyone, including the adults. The conversation will be awkward for about four evenings and wonderful afterwards.
• Keep a day. Whatever your faith or lack of it, choose one day or half a day when the screens stay in the drawer. The old tradition of rest is the best technology we have for this, and it has a very long track record.
• Read something with a spine. Twenty minutes of a book, with a pen, before anything else lights up. Your attention is a muscle, and this is a repetition.

Doing this is a small act of defiance in a culture that profits from your absence. And it is also a quiet act of faith in your own capacity. A man who has decided how he will spend his attention has already won the argument with the machine.

The hour you get back was always there. It was being rented out. The best use of a free hour is not a stranger's feed but a call to your mother, the last chapter, the fence or a very long walk with the dog. A family that wants a childhood with fewer screens can start with A Family Phone Plan That Puts Dinner, Sleep and Sunday Back on the Calendar and A Family Playbook for a Childhood With Fewer Screens and More Freedom.

The case in brief

1. Attention is the raw material of a self-governed life, and you have a fixed, unsaveable supply of it each day.
2. Free apps are paid for by advertisers, so the platform earns more the longer you stay, which gives its builders a constant reason to engineer features like the endless scroll, autoplay and the notification.
3. The oldest traditions, including the Sabbath of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, built protected rest into the calendar precisely so that no master could claim all of a person's time.
4. The libertarian is right that adults should be left alone by the state, and wrong that nothing is lost when they are left alone with a machine designed to win; the answer is not regulation but self-command, which is what self-government means.
5. The cost shows up in work, in reading, at the dinner table and in the quality of our citizenship, and the remedy is a handful of dull habits that any family can start tonight.

What you can do: tonight, turn off every notification except calls and texts from people, and charge your phone outside your bedroom.