The Year of Attention

If you watched my latest #rawvlog this is no surprise, but we are bringing back the concept of Yearly Themes.

I prefer themes to resolutions. The latter feels all too easy to fail, to fall off a bandwagon once and have an excuse to throw up ones hands in futility. Themes on the other hand, feel more like a guiding principle, something that you can continuously adjust and measure against. You may not end up in the exact location you want, but you’ll probably be only a few blocks away, if that makes sense.

So what is my theme in 2025? Well, I waxed overly long and lyrical about this to the camera, but I have noticed my attention span shortening over the years, and my tendency to allow my focus to be yanked around more than I wish. I also rambled about WHY this is happening - not just to me but increasingly to us all.*

In summary, ”we live in a society.” And the way we have deliberately structured that society over the last decade - between social media, smartphones, soundbyte politics, outrage farming, and measuring value via engagement - has been…bad. It’s been bad and a lot of chickens are coming home to roost in 2025.

And in recognition of that reality, I’ve christened this, The Year of Attention. Specifically where we are and aren’t spending it.

One of the few ways I feel able to seize control back over my attention is deliberate curation of where I’m going to direct my media money and resources. I won’t go so far as to say that “mainstream media” (and I cringe to type that phrase) is bad, but I do think it’s been manipulated beyond repair but our current age of engagement and hypercapitalism. Like so many products and businesses, it’s been shaped and influenced by incentives that benefit shareholders - owners over consumers. Much if not most of our economy is moving in this direction, if not already operating this way. Meaning that at a deep level, the news isn’t meant to inform, it’s meant to turn a profit.

I’m going to be spending my media budget on a very curated handful of publications (across the political spectrum) whose editorial honesty are established and well credited. But otherwise, I’m also going to spend both my money and my attention at new, independent media platforms who produce topical, well-backed journalism. A great example is 404 Media, who are a young but impressive outlet that primarily focuses on technology. I will also maintain my subscriptions to “local” media, which includes journalism in Utah where I have not lived for over a decade but where I remain a voter.

Another way to manage my attention is going to be more discerning about what I care about. The first Trump administration was a masterclass in distraction politics and outrage deflection…and it’s a tactic that works on me. On the eve of a second term, poised to be even more toxic and extreme than the last in some important ways, I need to set the intention now to not participate in the tactic on my side. There are a lot of causes and policies I care about, but I need to not allow my political and social sympathy to be hijacked by bad actors seeking to profit off of or benefit from my focus being on X while they do Y.

Finally, I’m going to be choosing to focus my attention back on things like writing and video editing; yes because I enjoy it, but also because I believe it makes be a better thinker. Spending years having to structure and articulate my own thoughts or reported facts into a coherent narrative was probably the best cognitive training I could have had, and I’ve become aware of that faculty becoming weaker without my creative outlets. I believe part of my shortened attention span and lapsed ability to focus as I would wish comes from letting my creative muscles waste away for the last couple of years. And as anyone looking down the barrel of a new year will opine, the key is exercise!

So that’s what we’re doing here at Decadent Industries this year. We are paying more and better attention to the things that serve us (or in some cases refusing to spend our attention on things that don’t). We are pushing back on the market forces and social realities that profit off our exhaustion or inability to focus. And we’re goofing off on the internet again, no matter who is or isn’t along for the ride.

*Scott Galloway, noted professor, author and podcaster takes this a step further in his latest episode of Pivot, and he thinks we no longer live in an attention economy but rather an addiction economy. It’s an interesting take, I’m not sure he’s entirely wrong!