Your attention is lucrative.

Today we live in a hyperconnected, hypermarketed, hypercapitalist place where attention is no longer a passive thing.

When you hold attention today you can literally make money. Every scroll, every click, every pause, every double-tap, it’s tracked, tagged, and sold.

Attention is like the new currency. Companies build billion-dollar empires off the mere fact that you looked, you engaged, and you sold it to the next person by yourself with the story you told.

Time, thoughts, gaze — they’re all lucrative.

In this economy, your distraction is profitable. Outrage is profitable. Even your healing is being packaged as a product, and you’re being trained to look inward forever — not upward, not outward, not toward each other.

I once worked with a founder who strongly believed the individualised world is bad for us.

Today I see that an individualised population as she said is easier to manipulate and harder to organise.

However, this morning from a newsletter I read from ismatu gwendolyn I realise that we can choose where your attention goes.

And when you begin to pour that precious attention that trillion-dollar force into communal work, something that doesn’t only benefit you but a community at large, something radical happens.

You stop feeding the algorithms and statistical data, and you start nurturing the human.

You help someone else get free at the expense of your comfort and get comfort in turn.

You help someone else feel seen and you too are seen.

You help someone else dream again and you too dream more of a better world.

And in doing that — you heal differently.

You heal that emptiness that you think you can hide. The emptiness that shows itself in your thoughts and tells you you can end it by doing more, not being still, pivoting, and giving more of you but receiving less each time you try.

When your attention stops feeding the algorithm and starts nourishing people, movements, and mutual aid — that's when it starts multiplying impact, not just consumption.

It is not a mistake that the top 1% controllers of wealth in our world today doubled their money in the past five years. And now we have much more tools than we can ever use or learn with more springing up daily.

Capitalism thrives with your attention to fuel the system. But liberation demands your attention to build the village. However you define your village is up to you.

We are not meant to hoard healing.

We are meant to return, to water, to plant for harvest together— to double the kindness given to the next person so there’s a ripple effect of gratitude.

That’s what communal attention does.

That’s how your gaze becomes a gift.

That’s how your presence becomes medicine.

So yes, your attention is lucrative.

But only when you pour it into community does it become an anchor that saves someone for yet another day.

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My morning journaling.

Thanks for reading 💞