Attention Is the Real Currency

Forget dollars. The real currency is the thing you just spent reading this sentence, and you will never get it back.

In 1971, economist Herbert Simon wrote the sentence that explains the entire internet: "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." A university paper on the attention economy, quoting Simon, puts it plainly: attention is the scarce resource, and the competition is among varieties of information to command it.

Half a century later, the bill came due. DataReportal's 2025 figures, compiled by BroadbandSearch, put the average user's daily social media time at 2 hours and 21 minutes — with 5.66 billion social media user identities worldwide as of October 2025, spread across an average of 6.83 platforms per month. Do the arithmetic: 2 hours and 21 minutes a day is roughly 36 days a year. More than a month of waking life, annually, handed over in increments too small to notice, to companies whose entire business model is charging rent on your focus.

That is what makes attention different from every other currency. You cannot save it — Simon's successors note you cannot accumulate attention like money for a rainy day. You cannot borrow it. You cannot get a refund. Spending it on one thing excludes spending it on another, and the spending never stops, because in your waking hours you are always attentive to something. The only question is who decides what that something is: you, or the feed that was engineered to decide for you.

The platforms understood this before everyone else did. They do not sell you a product. They sell advertisers access to the moments when you are looking. Your attention is the product, the inventory, and the checkout line, all at once — and you are the only participant in the transaction who does not get paid.

Attention is the real currency. It is the only one you are rich in at birth, the only one you spend every second of every day, and the only one whose value goes up the moment you refuse to spend it carelessly. Guard it accordingly. The feed will not guard it for you. The feed is the one spending it.

The underlying reporting is filed in the Evidence Locker: University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Library Philosophy and Practice, quoting Herbert Simon (1971); BroadbandSearch, citing DataReportal (2025).