Protect your attention like critical infrastructure
Because it is
I must treat my mind as critical infrastructure—because it is.
For example, roads move people and goods. Power grids move energy.
Attention moves meaning.
When that system gets congested, contaminated, or hijacked, everything downstream suffers: your judgment, your patience, your relationships, your ability to plan, your ability to learn. Building and passing on accurate information depends on that bandwidth.
So “protect my attention like critical infrastructure” means I stop treating my feeds as entertainment and start treating them like an intake valve.
If I wouldn’t pour toxic random fluids into a city’s water supply, I shouldn’t pour random emotional toxins into my nervous system all day either.
In a high-noise environment, the adult move is deliberate allocation: what gets through, what gets filtered, what gets capped. That’s part of building a Cognitive Immune System—and practicing Critical Ignoring on purpose.
How I implement it (practically):
Triage, then engage. Before I react, I ask: Who is speaking? What’s their incentive? What is this trying to pull out of me—curiosity, clarity, or outrage? (If it spikes my body, it triggers a pause.)
Build “attention guardrails.” I set time windows for social media instead of grazing all day. I turn off nonessential notifications. I keep my “deep work” times sacred because that’s where time-binding actually happens.
Curate my environment without severing my community. Here’s a Facebook example: I’m not defriending people. I’m unfollowing their content. That’s a key distinction. I can value the person, keep the relationship channel open, and still refuse to let an engagement-optimized stream rent space in my head. The critical reason is simple: repeated exposure trains the nervous system. If I keep ingesting identity-bait and outrage loops, I’m basically volunteering for a Neuro-Semantic Prison.
The part I’m watching carefully: I don’t want an information silo.
So I’m building structured cross-traffic instead of “algorithmic chaos.” My plan looks like this:
I follow a small number of people I disagree with who show intellectual honesty (they cite sources, correct themselves, and avoid dehumanizing language).
I balance social media with primary sources and long-form reporting (court opinions, speeches, datasets, full interviews).
I do a monthly “feed audit”: What themes are dominating my attention? What perspectives are missing? What’s making me dumber, faster? What’s making me wiser, slower?
That’s the social adult move: attention as a shared civic resource and a personal life-support system. If we want a grown-up civilization, we start by treating our own minds like something worth maintaining.
Thanks for posting here.
On the order for tasks of priority- organizing where my attention goes and what information I personally consume this year is in fact on the list.
Reading this article, I kept thinking —where my attention goes energy goes. Although, recall now that William said our experience is shaped by what we attend to.
Regardless, I will be taking a harder stand on certain personal experiences and disavowing hatred and bigotry more vigorously.