Attention is a luxury good

Every experience now just seems like people (companies) fighting over who can most obnoxiously distract you.

I bought a new phone recently for the first time in 8 years, and (a) had to set everything up all at once (ad blocking, no notifications, etc) which left me briefly exposed to how bad things are but (b) had to experience all the annoyingness of a modern phone trying to suggest things and sync things and bother me with stuff I don’t want.

No product is even remotely for the consumer anymore, they’re all just minimal pretenses to try and advertise you and extract more of your attention and money.

So yeah, outside some sheltered life of luxury, it’s a constant fight to preserve focus against people wanting to steal it.

Culture is also a luxury good, by this definition. If you read the Wikipedia summary of a Shakespeare play, you can fake a basic understanding of the plot. But you’ve gotten the social proof (e.g. dinner-party survival) without the deeper appreciation of the characters and their motivations.

As far as that goes, empathy seems to be a borderline luxury good at this point.

OP writes about conspicuous consumption/leisure, not really luxury. Similarly, while a Birkin bag could be considered a luxury good, its defining feature is being something more, the artificial scarcity and increased demand with price amke it a Veblen good.

Also, things you can buy with attention aren't really expensive, they're just constantly priced. That is you have 10-14 hours of attention a day, and you use it or lose it, every minute of attention is largely the same, with a little ADHD you can switch quickly. Listening to a concert online and going to the philharmonics costs about the same in attention.

The latter two items statement make this more of a self-report* than anything else. I have never read more more books nor listened to more podcasts than the year when I was homeless.

* the author doesn't actually enjoy those two things and considers their value to lie in signaling ("sending a message")

You don't become addicted because of luxury. Attention is not a luxury. It's our time. It's our most precious resource and when it's "wasted" it's often because something is going terribly wrong.

But It’s baked into our brains to want to eliminate additional work when it comes to getting information and feeling validated, and this won’t get any better as long as there are devices and substances that keep making the dopamine hits coming faster.

In the age of social media and short-form content, many people insist that our attention spans are getting shorter. But historian Daniel Immerwahr reminds us that people have cried wolf for centuries about technology hijacking our attention. In this episode, Adam and Daniel dive into evidence that what’s changing is not our attention spans, but the objects of our focus. They also discuss moral panics of the past, compare the cognitive benefits of video games and the opera, and debate whether or not Marvel movies are a waste of time.

https://podcastaddict.com/worklife-with-adam-grant/episode/2...

He gave an example. Given infinite time, we could make our own mobile phone. But they are valuable precisely because rather than gather all the raw materials, make all of the higher-order components, and assemble the phone ourselves, we can walk into a store and exchange currency for that finished good. This pattern recurs over and over.

So value comes from our ability do or get things that we would otherwise spend significant portions of our lives doing or making for ourselves.

Attention it time.

Alike overfishing, alike taking most of land from nature to cities, mining and agriculture, we can look at attention as a resource than once was ubiquotious, now is scarce... and luxury.

The author seemed to have taken it and made it into an article.

Human attention is the determinant of monetary value.

Gold is expensive because it takes a lot of human attention to find and refine it.

Food became cheaper when it required less human attention to make it.

"Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. The fact that a place is special to some because of its great peace and beauty may, by that very fact, make it for another a resource to exploit, in such a way that its peace and beauty are destroyed. Attention has consequences"

A good friend of mine is an Imam and he explained to me that in Islam heedlessness is even described as a sin(Al-Ghaflah). Attention is not just a luxury good, and forgetfulness just some waste of time or money, it destroys a person's ability to distinguish between what's real and what isn't.

One of the reasons why we seem to be so ineffective at combating distraction is I think because we've even lost that kind of language that makes clear how consequential lack of attention is.

the most interesting luxury thing i saw was palmer luckey showing his modretro chromatic game boy in his interview with rogan this week. sapphire crystal screen, special alloy from the weapons factory, offline, 90s aesthetic, exists for the pleasure of it, etc. what luxury really is is an expression of value, or values. the most coarse version of that is "status," but what about religious garb, artifacts and symbols? to an atheist, a hijab or a cross is a luxury item, but to the wearer, they are the literal, existential point of being. it's pretty crass and unserious to suggest these are just status symbols in a materialist power struggle. things that express values that bring you joy or pleasure are not a "luxury," as this presumes you are nothing but an undifferentiated clump of cells with the same material needs as any other one, and any distinction in satisfying those needs is superfluous. and to what? your meaningless existence as grist for an eternal struggle? surely.

we need a new model of luxury. in economics, there are normal and inferior goods, then giffen goods whose demand becomes higher when the price rises, veblen goods whose price is inverse to utility, and some other ones, but they are all names for the shapes of price and demand curves, but they're all just curves.

materialist ideas about luxury are dumb thought terminating cliches that deprive others of the opportunity to contemplate or appreciate them. we need new thinking, imo

From where I am, I can't possibly know if that's a genuine message with valuable advice, or some self-justification he's making about himself, or some trick (of which there are many related to messages of self-worth).

He acknowledge hints of these possibilities by saying that attention provides "a message to ourselves and others". That is a fascinating brain leak right there.

In a more real assessment of reality, the truth is that I don't have much control over my attention. Might as well just let it flow and see what I can do with whatever comes from the interaction, no worries.

Does that imply the risk of falling into an attention trap? Definitely. Anyone that says he is not subject to that risk is lying.

I hereby advice anyone who has a non trivial curiosity about ∀ that requires focus and concentration (pretty much ∪ of HN interests) to appreciate it and care it as if it is your most precious procession.

I have said this before and I’ll say it again — if you are not super into getting a kid, don’t.