The only thing that is actually used or consumed in the transaction between you and some bit of information—the only thing that gets used up and has to be replaced—is the attention you gave to that information when it appeared. That time and attention are gone. If you spent five minutes composing a text, the attention you spent on that transaction is gone, it’s not renewable. If you clicked on an advertisement, or let it play longer than necessary, or stopped doing what you were doing because a thumbnail propelled you down a YouTube rabbit hole, or into a never-ending chain of hyperlinks and doomscrolling, that attention has quite literally been consumed, and you can’t get it back. It has been consumed by the information you gave it to.

Note the expression: “pay attention.” You should take this literally: The cost of taking in new information is the attention you have to pay to process that information. Like paying three dollars for a caffeinated drink, you’re paying three seconds, or three minutes, or three hours for some bit of information—an article, an ad, a video, a text message, a meme, a notification, a conversation, a book, a post.

So the question you have to ask yourself: Is it worth it? Since attention is finite—the class will end, the day will end, the year will end, life will end—is the thing you’re paying attention to worth the time you’re giving it? Especially relative to all the things you’re not giving it to, and all the things you could be giving it to?

Think of your daily attention like you think of your daily, weekly, or monthly budget. You ask yourself this question about worth all the time when you’re spending money—I can’t afford that car so I’ll get this one; that restaurant isn’t worth the money so I’ll go here instead; those clothes are overpriced so I won’t buy them; I’d rather have $5 than a snack, so I won’t go to the convenience store. 

In the same way you budget dollars, you budget attention, whether that’s what you mean to do or not. And in the end you’re left with a transaction record, and we can see how much time you budgeted to doing what, and we can read between the lines to figure out what is actually important to you.

Ask yourself this question: If your attention budget were exposed to the world today, would you be confident or embarrassed?

Would it reflect the things you care about, or just the things that are easy to give your attention to because they don’t make you work very hard?

In the same way you have a finite number of dollars to spend in return for the goods you need to survive, produce things, and experience value and joy, you have a finite quantity of attention to pay for the information you need to survive, produce, and experience value and joy, and every merchant you’ve ever spent time or money with—including me—knows that you have a finite quantity of attention to give in a day, or a month, or a year, or a life, and they want you to pay your attention to them and not to their competitors, and they’ll do almost anything to get you to do it. 

That “almost anything” is what we’re going to cover in the vocabulary activity that follows; each of the terms I supply will, in one way or another, define a strategy or feature of the general environment the various merchants in your life will leverage to capture your attention, defining the term “merchant” here broadly, to include everything from gas stations to grocery stores, online retailers to social media platforms, advertisers to politicians, independent journalists to legacy media outlets, from your local community all the way up to the national or international stage. Whoever wants your attention and employs the following tactics of the attention economy is an “attention merchant” for the purposes of this activity.

Understanding that your attention is finite and precious is foundational to making decisions about where to allot attention and what to ignore. It doesn’t mean you’ll never be panicked or urgent, or that there’s nothing to be panicked or urgent about, but hopefully it does mean that you can be less reactive, gullible, partisan, and vulnerable, and more selective, nuanced, confident, and even indifferent.