True dat.

Even commentators who spend a lot of time fretting about the modern-day ‘crisis of distraction’ rarely seem to grasp the full implications of this. For example, you hear it said that attention is a ‘finite resource’, and finite it certainly is: according to one calculation, by the psychologist Timothy Wilson, we’re capable of consciously attending to about 0.0004 per cent of the information bombarding our brains at any given moment. But to describe attention as a ‘resource’ is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals – such as food, money and electricity – are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, ‘distraction’ needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction – that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.

Excerpt from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Amazon India: “book link” (https://www.amazon.in/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Management-Mortals/dp/0374159122)