The 1% Control Their Attention

In the Age of Distraction, a Search for Those Who Still Look Up

We think much less than we think we think. ~ Daniel Kahneman

On the 6:44 am tram toward the city, pressed in among the collar-sagged workforce, I do a daily headcount of the vanishing. Out of all the commuters I see sat on the benches or standing in the aisles, I estimate, generously, that one, perhaps two, are not anesthetized by their phones. The rest stare blankly, zombie-eyed, fingers twitching toward another vertical scroll. We have built a world where checking out has become a primary form of checking in.

We belong to a species that, once proud of its inquiry and invention, now squints into curated voids. Of course, not everyone is looking down. Amid the hunched figures, necks craned into their little glowing altars, I sometimes notice a few people, some reading a hard copy book, or just staring. Not smiling, not frowning, just being. These are statistical anomalies. The 1%. And I find myself searching for them.

We are taught to think of the 1% as economic royalty, all hedge fund gloss and Davos cocktail hours. But I propose a different kind of 1%, a cognitive aristocracy of sorts. Those rare individuals who refuse to surrender their attention, who resist the gravity of the herd.

The data is anecdotal, yes. But then, so is most of history when it matters. Try walking down any commuter corridor in a major city, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, London, San Francisco and count how many people are not, in some form, digitally sedated. One percent, perhaps. The rest are swiping, scrolling, or ear budded on content like cud. Much of this content is not made to inform or uplift, but to occupy. To keep the hand busy and the mind still.

In a wise essay on curiosity and attention, the highly respected researcher and technologist, Andy Matuschak says social media attention leads to ‘faulty expectations’:

“If I find myself sucked into an hour-long Twitter binge, I’ll become noticeably more habituated to ultra-fast reward cycles. For hours afterwards, everything else will feel much slower, way less stimulating. I’ll suddenly need real willpower to read a book for a solid hour. The acute effect wears off after a few hours, but some fraction of it persists into the next day.”

Overstimulated

How many are now wearing headphones, with that incessant hum to distract the mind from just being? The ambient soundscape of a city, the rhythm of their own footsteps, the quiet space where an idea might take root, all of it is now curated away. On college campuses, a place once dedicated to the expansion of the mind, it is rare to see a student walking without them, insulated from the serendipity of the shared world.

Then there is what we physically consume. If you stand in a hotel bar around 6 p.m., I did this recently, in a so-called “family-friendly” resort, you’ll see toddlers eating fried food, fed with one of their parents hands, while they (the parents) order their third cocktail with the other. I looked for a sign of kinship, another person with a book, or someone simply watching the world go by. Over 5 nights, I found none. The act of ordering water, or simply declining to drink, marks you as suspicious, almost a foreign body in the bloodstream of culture. In the early 20th century, temperance was a mass movement; now, abstention has become a statistical anomaly.

During the hotel breakfast, at tables around us, families were locked in a digital communion, parents and children staring into their respective screens. My daughter and I started our usual hotel breakfast game of UNO. The game proved an irresistible invitation, and soon eight children had abandoned their devices to join our table. They weren't bored; they were starved of attention.

Who reads for pleasure anymore, and who writes not because they must, but because they can’t not write? Walk into any bookstore, assuming you can find one, and observe who isn’t just loitering. The solitary woman leafing through Zadie Smith or Robert Caro, the man sketching something into a worn Moleskine: again (anecdotally), the 1%. I saw this firsthand recently in a major stationery store near Luton airport. When I asked the assistant where I could find a real bookshop, she shook her head. ‘Nowhere around here. No one reads books anymore.’

Let’s remind ourselves what Neil Postman wrote in his brilliant book Amusing Ourselves to Death:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

Health and Well-Being

And fitness. Not the peloton-hyped, biometric-optimized performance art version. Just the quiet, consistent discipline of moving your body each day, without documenting it for others. At most, one in a hundred of my acquaintances does thirty minutes of rigorous movement a day. Not because they can’t, but because to do so would be to veer away from the gravitational field of ordinary life, to risk looking earnest. In a world where ironic detachment is social currency, trying hard at anything risks ostracism. So we sit. We sip. We scroll. Those that do make the effort are not chasing aesthetics or longevity. They just live in a rhythm that honors effort.

This all sounds self-congratulatory, which is why it must be said: the point is not to idealize the new 1%, nor to scold the 99%. It is to ask how and when we began accepting statistical normality as a moral compass. That something is widely done has never made it right. Or healthy. Or meaningful.

Of course, every era has had its distractions, its own forms of mass-produced cud to chew on. Cheap newspapers, radio serials, television dinners. But never before has the distraction been so portable, so personal, and so algorithmically perfect at holding our gaze.

In fact, some of the greatest civilizational shifts have begun with that quiet, deviant 1%. The abolitionist, the dissident, the person who decided that perhaps it wasn’t necessary to drink gin at lunch just because everyone else in the 1950s did. Social progress is, in large part, a history of small minorities insisting on their right to be odd.

Odd, of course, is not always right. But neither is the chorus of mass behavior. If there is a point here it is this: We must learn to look at our surroundings not as reflections, but as conditions. Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it is inevitable. Or good. Or sane.

To live well, in this strange and digitized century, might require nothing less than cultivating your own form of deviance. To look up. To sip tea when the world calls for cocktails. To write, when writing has no audience. To lift your own body weight without recording it. To pay attention without the excuse of a podcast.

To be in the top 1% now is not about wealth or status, but deviation. It’s about refusing the default. The rare person who resists the compulsion to scroll, who walks when others ride, who reads when others swipe, who thinks when others echo, that person is now the statistical anomaly.

This is not rebellion in the cinematic sense. It’s a subtler insurgency. A commitment to being, if only for a few moments each day, part of the vanishing 1% who still choose with intent. And that may be the last meaningful freedom we have.

Stay curious

Colin