Writing · Essay
Attention is not the same as value
Watching more young people aim for careers built on audience size has left me with an uncomfortable question: what happens to an economy when attention becomes the main thing people are trained to produce?
Attention is a real asset, and creators can build genuine businesses. But attention is also zero-sum and increasingly cheap to generate with AI. The skills that compound over decades, such as deep domain expertise, craftsmanship and the ability to solve unglamorous problems, rarely go viral.
It is also a measurement problem, which is why it interests me as an analyst. We track followers, views and engagement because they are easy to count. Far fewer people track the quieter signals: skills acquired, problems solved, trust earned. When the visible metric drifts away from the underlying value, behaviour follows the metric.
When the visible metric drifts away from the underlying value, behaviour follows the metric.
I do not have a neat answer. I do think parents, educators and employers should talk openly about the difference between being noticed and being useful, and make sure the second path stays attractive.
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