Attention hijacking is the thing I worry most about on a long term basis for humanity's thriving.

Perhaps ignorant, and I should be more focused on "real" problems. But we do seem to be making longitudinal progress up maslow's hierarchy at a global level.

Techno-capitalism is slowly but surely turning us into something non-human. Attention is upstream of everything: presence, agency, love, all of if it.

And when we lose any ability to direct our attention, humanity's light gets snuffed out. Individually and collectively.

I think Nan's instinct is probably right, and that "willpower" alone won't get us there. To extend the food analogy:

When you walk into a health food store, they don't blast sugar and cocaine in your face. Alcoholics can remove the booze from the house. But ditching computers or screens altogether? It's not really conceivable.

Willpower is cute, but for at least for most people (and probably, eventually for all of us), are no match for the fire-breathing dragon of capital + engagement incentives + algorithms.

Choose your flavor of instagram reels, match 3 games, sports betting. We're going to start combining all of the above. See @Gurwinder’s excellent Why Everything is Becoming a Game (gurwinder.blog/p/why-ev…).

I think our best bet is probably some combination of something like GLP-1 for attention or other cognitive aid, e.g. neuralink/ nudge type form factor, at least until we start augmenting our biology more significantly.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and we can collectively wake-up via some other kind of consciousness revolution, better tools (extremely aligned AIs?) or otherwise. But I'm not optimistic.

At the very least, you and I can rage against the dying light, and seek to treat our attention as sacred.