The emergence of physical and mental fitness is a central topic on people’s minds these days with the epidemic of mental sickness, mainly driven by a lack of social connections and a sense of agency. The new era of sedentary lifestyles with decreased social ties along with increased excess in life choices has propelled people to find internal suffering to be harder to deal with these days. Hence, the pursuit of physical and mental development fitness has become the central focus for many to help bridge these gaps.
To amplify this path with a better focus, let us introduce the third pillar that is intertwined with both physical and mental fitness: attention capital fitness. It is the core foundation that we must learn to incorporate into our everyday practice to accelerate and support our success.
Attention capital evolution in recent human history
Our society rapidly advanced with the rise in energy generation and work specialization, effectively allowing people to afford a higher standard of living and opening up more options to choose from than ever in our recent human history.
The economy became the backbone to incentivize people to drive innovation and gain more advancements to achieve a sense of agency within our current social construct, thus staying on the path of relentless growth. This created a flywheel effect with a second-order downstream impact to drive prices down, provide more consumer options, and establish an economic model to perpetually sell with continuous iterations without an end.
To sustain this ecosystem, corporations, therefore, require to continually convince consumers and buy their products/services for basic needs, conveniences, or perceived social value i.e. a sense of agency by association with the brand. Likewise, this has always applied as the baseline for society and politics to persuade the populace in any intended direction and decision process.
The attention economy is as ancient as our human DNA and now has become even more amplified as our meta-culture has advanced; it is now at a level where not only corporations but also all other entities around us are now competing for everyone’s attention capital units. The name of the game is to outcompete to capture our attention to convince us to make a decision to support the said products/services via purchase, election, or display of social proof.
With increased connectivity and sophisticated technology tools, flood gate has opened up completely without any particularly designed governor to modulate the immense amount of influence by these entities by way of advertisements and ideology spread. In other words, it has become easier to infiltrate the attention span of people, especially with the handheld supercomputer devices at our disposal along with tools such as social media mimicking our limbic system to exude emotional responses to captivate our attention; all in the game of the never-ending journey of growth in perpetuity.
We therefore now live in a society with hyper-attention frequency where everyone is competing for each other’s attention capital to guide toward their products/services as the chosen option; an abundance of options, therefore, forces all participating members of a society to become the best salesperson and continuously spreading influences at all times with meticulous reiterations e.g. through the art of persuasion, use of technology, and A-B testing.
Consumer as the product
We as the consumers, therefore, are a product for all intentioned sellers to extract our earned resources, money, social proof, and/or voting rights. Given this landscape, we must become judicious in how we allocate our attention capital. To abandon this existing construct is not the answer as our current society and economy have evolved to resemble our dopaminergic human nature to pursue agency and survival.
The more practical solution is to find a balanced ground whereby introducing value instillation in the society as a whole to —
- Collectively become aware of this existing mechanism via education
- Establish institutions to standup transparency for visibility by people to make an informed decision
- Practice attention capital fitness
Attention economy ecosystem and practicing attention capital fitness based on desired outcome
To unpackage this further, with an average of 16 waking hours a day, we are vulnerable to the relentless pursuit by sellers, including corporations, politicians, digital creators, and various others. Thus, to streamline our focus, it becomes essential for us equally be relentless in selecting what we want to admit vs. reject from these parties.
This modulation only becomes possible when we become aware of this seller ecosystem as the first baseline. As the next steps, we must practice reiterating the design of our space and mind to properly filter what we ‘choose’ to take in as input.
The simple truth here is that everyone in our collective knowledge system will continually project their reality to convince each other to share their imagined realities together. There is simply no escaping this given it is a feature of our human nature. Thus, the core idea is how we effectively calibrate and optimize the level of inputs from others that are aligned with our desired outcome.
Practicing attention capital fitness starts with modulating one’s focus while being presented with an onslaught of distractions from both external influences and internal thoughts/emotions. Regardless of these continual signals, we must be able to acknowledge them as they are as a baseline before we can practice intentional focus. This focus will always be established based on desired outcomes that we come up with for ourselves and it is highly individualized for each person’s reality.
The desired outcome informs what types of inputs we should remove frictions to freely flow in vs. introduce frictions to prevent them from flowing into our purview. Hence, the design of our space and mind becomes a paramount step to first establish and continually evolve it over time i.e. modulate any existing frictions to either purposefully remove or introduce them into our attention ecosystem depending on the desired outcome.
Thought experiment of practicing attention capital fitness
Depending on this desired outcome, everyone requires specific sources and degree of inputs that is tailored specifically for them. As a thought experiment, if a person is pursuing fitness with a healthy lifestyle, then the inputs from others should be appropriately calibrated for this person in the consumed material via reading, podcasts, connected media, as well as her home and workout environment. These will influence this person to be encouraged to continue working out with an informed workout routine, diet, and recovery methods.
If these inputs were, however, over-consumed where she does not translate them into actions, it signals a need to modulate her attention capital for a different outcome. Further, if her attention ecosystem was plagued with other distracting feed that is not useful, e.g. celebrity news, and results in her not actioning the necessary steps for her desired fitness outcome, it likewise signals a need to recalibrate her attention capital allocation.
Asking the right questions to stay on track
To truly streamline our attention capital allocation, we must ask ourselves the right set of questions to stay on track. Am I consuming this because it resonates with my desired outcome or rather am I falling under the spell of others and it is not helping me; is it an inspiring agent or a distraction preventing me from staying action-biased? Asking the right questions will allow us to acknowledge the current environment of the mind and thus be able to transition to the intended focus instead. Keep your head up with a deep focus on your present my friends.
