The Fog: Living Inside an Attention Extraction Economy

Sarah sits on the living room floor, phone in hand, while her toddler tugs at her sleeve.

“Mommy, come play!”

A flash of irritation rises. She just needs to clear a few messages. “In a second,” she says, without looking up.

It’s a moment most of us recognize. Not because we’re bad parents, partners, friends, or professionals, but because the stream never ends, and notifications arrive like weather.

This is the daily condition of modern life: a constant state of being pulled away.

We call it distraction, poor discipline, a focus problem, but it’s not.

We live inside an attention extraction economy.

Manufactured Fog

Almost everyone you meet is overwhelmed, exhausted, and quietly less effective than they know they could be. It can feel like your capacity to think, create, and be present has been dismantled piece by piece, until your days become a blur of half-finished thoughts.

And all you hear when searching for an answer is: It’s your fault. You’re lazy. You lack discipline. You need a better system. A new productivity app. A new method. More grit.

That story is a convenient lie. It burdens you with a problem you can’t solve alone.

Because the fog clouding your mind is the exhaust of a system optimized to capture and fragment human attention. Sophisticated machinery built with the collective contribution of some of the smartest people in the world, with billions of dollars invested in algorithmically powered interruptions.

You are not weak. You are simply outmatched by design.

At Microsoft, internal telemetry has shown employees are interrupted roughly every two minutes during core work hours. That’s up to 275 interruptions a day. These are highly paid, highly trained knowledge workers inside one of the most sophisticated corporations on earth.

What chance do the rest of us have, once you add parenting, life admin, group chats, email, news, and the steady drip of “just one more thing?”

So, the obvious question is: can’t you just adapt? Can’t you train yourself to snap back into focus?

Not easily. The cost of switching is real. Researchers like Gloria Mark have found it often takes more than twenty minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption.

The modern day is not designed for deep work or deep presence, but for what Linda Stone once called continuous partial attention, a state where you are always reachable, always scanning, always slightly behind.

And you have no chance if you keep treating this like a personal flaw instead of a system.

What You’re Up Against?

An incentive stack that is shaping billions of lives, the machinery has the following main mechanisms:

Compulsion: Opting out is made to feel irresponsible. You must be in the parent group chat, or you might miss something important. You must be reachable after hours, or you’re not a team player. You must respond quickly, or you risk seeming indifferent.
Fragmentation: Your focus is broken into tiny pieces. Every ping, every badge, every “quick question” shatters your ability to think deeply. Your day becomes a patchwork of context switches, unfinished thoughts, and restarts.
Saturation: More input creates less clarity. The writer who consumes endless advice stops writing. The patient who researches symptoms online becomes more anxious. Excess information becomes a burden, not empowerment.
Scapegoating: The system sells you the story that your exhaustion is a personal failing. Then it sells you the “solution”: another app, another newsletter, another hack. The machine that fragmented you profits from your attempt to fix yourself.

Self-blame becomes a prison. You spend your remaining energy judging yourself instead of changing the conditions around you.

It’s costing you the quality of your work: fewer original thoughts, less depth, less craft.

It’s costing you the quality of your life: a constant low-grade stress, a mind that’s always slightly elsewhere.

And it’s costing you the quality of your relationships: partial presence becomes normal. “In a second” becomes a lifestyle.

Sarah doesn’t have to be a perfect mother; her toddler needs a mother who is there. Most of us keep looking for the perfect system; all we truly need is a life where being there is possible.

Acts of Presence

The First Act: Refusal

You can’t defeat an industrial system with individual willpower. You can’t “detox” from a permanent environment.

But the moment you see the machine for what it is, you perform the first act of refusal: you stop playing the blame game. You stop confusing compliance with virtue and calling your injuries “weakness.”

Then you can do the only thing that works: create conditions where focus and presence can exist.

The Second Act: Carve Space

Carve out blocks of time where you are unreachable. Let the world wait. A declaration that you are not a resource to be mined.

Start small and make it real:

One hour a day with your phone in another room.
Notifications off by default, with a short whitelist for true humans and true emergencies.
Defined times for email and messages. Not because you don’t care—because you do.

Use that hour for what actually restores your agency: playing with your kids, walking with a friend, reading, writing, thinking, or doing nothing at all without being interrupted.

The Third Act: Redesign The System Around You

Personal boundaries help, but many of us live inside workplace systems that reward interruption. If you want lasting change, the environment has to change too.

Redesign work with the explicit goal of creating deep focus and meaningful output:

Async-by-default communication
Fewer tools, fewer channels
Hard caps on meetings
Protected focus time on calendars that is treated as real work
Leadership that models depth, not constant availability

Treat these as ideas, not prescriptions. Every team has its own constraints, incentives, and objectives. Start with the outcomes you want and design backward: quality, craft, speed with fewer errors, better decisions, healthier people.

Measure outcomes. Test. Iterate. Evolve. Make it a team sport.

And communicate your norms clearly, even beyond your team. A simple “I check email twice a day” does more than you think. It gives others permission to stop performing urgency.

A Cultural Shift

If we’re going to survive the next age of mass knowledge, democratized production, and always-on connectivity, we have to change what we value.

We need to stop rewarding responsiveness as a virtue and see it for what it often is: a symptom of a poorly designed system.

We need to treat deep, uninterrupted focus as a core objective and a leading indicator of quality of life and work.

We need to make constant availability slightly embarrassing.

Because attention is life. The clarity of our thoughts and the quality of our relationships depend on our ability to be present and to think without being constantly pulled apart.

A Simple Starting Protocol

If you want something you can implement this week, start here:

Two communication windows per day (for email/messages), published to the people you work with
Notifications off by default; whitelist only what is truly urgent
Two meeting-free blocks per week per person (minimum)
“If it can be written, it shouldn’t be a meeting,” as a default rule
A team agreement on response times (define what “fast” actually means)

Instead of becoming unreachable, you are reachable for what matters.

Your attention and your mind are not a resource to be mined. They are part of your humanity, your sovereignty, your agency. And no one has the right to take them from you.