Attention is the most scarce resource you have.
More than time. More than money.
Easiest way to change your life? Change what you pay attention to.
Attention is like a magnifying glass. Whatever you pay attention to gets amplified. Spend it on noise, and noise will multiply. Spend it on noticing beauty, and beauty will be all you can see.
Most people treat their attention like loose change. Imagine walking into a news outlet—or scrolling onto social media—and saying: “Here, take my attention. Do whatever you want with it. Spin me up, stress me out, make me argue with strangers on the internet. It’s all yours.”
We’d never hand over our wallets that way, but attention? People give it away daily. And then they wonder why their lives feel like noise.
When I share this, people usually push back and say, “But I’ll fall behind.” Or they ask, “If you’re not reading the news, how do you keep up?”
And I always wonder: keep up with what, exactly?
Most people can tell you every twist in the latest political scandal but they don’t know what’s happening in their own nervous system.
They can talk about the global economy but have no idea what’s happening in their own backyard.
That’s where the real disconnection lives.
Are you keeping up with your own body? I don’t mean tracking steps on a fitness app. I mean noticing the shallow way you’ve been breathing all day, the way your jaw tightens without you realizing it, the buzz of stress humming just below the surface.
Are you keeping up with your own backyard—the pulse of life right outside your door? Not the taxonomy of birds, but the way crows carve the same path across the evening sky, the way wildflowers erupt from bare ground as if conjured overnight, the way a breeze turns the trees into an orchestra. The world is alive at your doorstep, but most of us treat it like background noise.
And here’s the trap: Worrying endlessly about what you can’t control is a form of escapism. It keeps you busy, but it also lets you off the hook. Because it’s easier to get consumed by the “state of the world” than to care for the piece of the world right outside your window.
Yes, there are real tragedies in the world. But flooding myself with constant updates doesn’t make me more capable of responding to them. It makes me less. I become reactive, scattered, and depleted—the opposite of what the moment requires.
And if something truly important is happening—something I need to know—I don’t need a newsfeed to ambush me. What matters finds its way to me—through conversations, through community, through the natural flow of life.
Then I can choose how to engage. On my own terms. Not because I was whipped into outrage by headlines, but because I decided this is where I want to place my energy. And that choice makes all the difference.
In the end, your attention is the most valuable thing you have.
Guard it like your life depends on it. Because it does.
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Bold
