Every moment of attention we spend scrolling through social media is attention spent making money for someone else. The numbers are staggering: a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 20414, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years' worth of attention on the site, every single day. It's attention that we didn't spend on our families, or our friends, or ourselves. And just like time, once we've spent attention, we can never get it back. This is a really big deal, because our attention is the most valuable thing we have. We experience only what we pay attention to. We remember only what we pay attention to. When we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives.
