The ecology of attention

Degrowth in the infoscape

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

There’s a moment, usually around the seventh open tab, when your brain lets out a quiet scream. Not loud. Just a gentle, exhausted howl from somewhere behind your eyeballs. You've read ten headlines, watched half a video, skimmed three opinion pieces, checked your email, ignored two messages, and now you can't remember what you were doing in the first place. Welcome to the modern infoscape. It's busy, it's loud, and it's eating us alive.

We tend to think of degrowth as something that happens out there, in factories, in shipping lanes, on carbon charts. But there’s another frontier of excess that's closer to home, or rather, inside it. It’s your mind. Your attention. The ever-shrinking pool of focus you try to wrangle between morning news, work Slack, and whatever algorithm is screaming for you next. If the planet is suffering from overproduction, our minds are suffering from overconsumption.

We’re taking in too much, too fast, too often. Not because we’re greedy or curious, but because we’ve been trained to. Conditioned by platforms designed to pull, prod, ping, and reward. This isn’t just a buffet of distraction. It’s an extraction engine built by companies like Meta, Google, ByteDance, and X, whose profits depend on how long they can keep your eyes glued to a screen. These platforms aren't designed to help you connect or learn. They're built to harvest your attention, convert it into behavioural data, and sell that data to advertisers with frightening precision. In 2023 alone, Meta made over $116 billion in ad revenue, and it wasn’t because people loved looking at their aunt's vacation photos.

Everything – from the endless scroll, to the notifications, to the “recommended for you” feed – is tuned to maximize engagement, not meaning. You’re not the customer. You’re the yield. The longer you linger, the more predictable you become. And the more predictable you are, the more valuable your digital twin is to whoever’s paying for influence this week.

Your scrolling thumb? It's not idle. It's labor. It feeds a system that grows on clicks and thrives on division.

And let’s be honest, most of it isn’t nourishing. We’re not absorbing wisdom from the Library of Alexandria. We’re skimming TikTok, doomscrolling Reddit, or watching someone dramatically chop an onion in a cabin in Norway. We’ve built a digital world where attention gets mined like coal, then sold back to us as lifestyle content or political anxiety. It's a strange loop. You feel drained, so you reach for more. The more you consume, the less you notice you're starving.

Here's the twist: the human mind isn’t infinite. You can’t grow it on demand. No update has the capacity to triple your focus or patch your burnout. The cognitive system, like any ecosystem, has limits. Push it too hard, and it breaks. What we’re seeing now isn't just a distraction. It’s the collapse of coherence. A collective inability to sort signal from noise, to hold a thought long enough to follow it through, to care deeply about something before the next thing pops up.

That’s why degrowth belongs here too. Not just in oil rigs and factories, but in our feeds, our screens, our hours. It’s not about going offline forever or rejecting technology altogether. It’s about recognising that sufficiency has a place in our mental lives. That “just enough” might be better than “as much as possible.” That clarity is more useful than volume.

In practical terms, that might look like closing the laptop at 6 p.m. or reading one article slowly instead of twenty headlines quickly. Or resisting the urge to turn every passing thought into a post. Or even, and brace yourself, sitting in silence for fifteen whole minutes without filling it with anything.

Yes, I know. That last one sounds suspiciously like meditation, which is all well and good until your legs fall asleep and your inner monologue starts narrating your to-do list. But silence matters. So does boredom. So does the long pause where nothing productive happens and no one is watching. Those are not bugs in the system. They’re features. In fact, they’re the only things keeping us sane.

The thing is, our current information economy doesn’t want us to be sane. It wants us to be reactive, agitated, and always reachable. Because calm people don’t binge. Focused people don’t click twelve ads in a row. And thoughtful people might even start questioning the system that keeps them overstimulated in the first place.

So reclaiming attention is a political act. A form of resistance. To turn off notifications isn’t just good for your mental health, it’s bad for business, at least for the businesses that thrive on your compulsive checking. To choose slowness is to reject their growth model. It’s like planting a garden in the middle of a shopping mall. Unprofitable. Subversive. Necessary.

Degrowth in the infoscape asks us to rethink what we value. Not just the content we consume, but the context we create. Do we make space for quiet? For depth? For reflection? Or do we fill every gap with noise? Maybe it’s time to revive the commons of silence, the shared spaces where no one’s broadcasting and nothing is optimized. Maybe we need less signal, not more. Maybe the best answer right now is to shut up and listen. Or, failing that, at least stop refreshing the homepage.

And look, I’m not saying you have to become a monk. I’m not even saying you need to delete Instagram, though if you do, your cat won’t miss the limelight. What I’m saying is, we need to notice what our attention is feeding. What it's building. What it's allowing to grow.

Because attention is creative. The things you pay attention to become real. If you spend your hours chasing outrage, your world becomes angry. If you spend them in fear, it shrinks. But if you guard them carefully, if you spend them with care, curiosity, and rest, the shape of your life changes. Ideas come back. So do conversations that matter, the ability to sit with uncertainty, and a kind of quiet creativity that doesn’t shout for likes. You might notice the way your thinking deepens, your relationships feel less rushed, and your time no longer slips through your fingers like a broken feed. When attention isn’t being mined, it begins to compost, feeding something slower, stranger, and more alive.

Degrowth, in this sense, isn’t austerity. It’s design. A different kind of abundance, where enough is plenty, and presence is wealth.

So try it. Leave a little room. Read one less thing. Share one fewer opinion. Watch one cloud float by without naming it. It’s not much. But it’s a crack in the wall.

And sometimes, all it takes is one well-placed crack to bring down a very silly tower.