The Ecology of Attention
What we choose to notice becomes our world
We live inside an economy that competes for our attention and then sells it to advertisers. After a while, the competition becomes the air we breathe, speeding our minds, fragmenting our focus, and convincing us that being “informed” is the same as being connected. But attention is not just a personal resource; it is an ecological one. What we repeatedly notice, we strengthen. What we ignore, we let atrophy inside ourselves and in the world we share.
Public health has a way of teaching this. If we focus solely on treatment, we build systems that are excellent at rescue and poor at prevention. If we focus on prevention, we begin to notice the importance of housing, food, wages, transportation, green spaces, and a sense of belonging. The ecology of attention determines whether we build more emergency rooms or parks, more prisons or schools, more campaigns or community kitchens.
Individually, attention behaves like soil. It can be compacted by constant traffic or restored by rest and replenishment. A few simple practices work like compost: a morning without the phone, a walk after lunch, a rule that conversations at dinner are about the day, not the news cycle. These are not small things. They rehabilitate the field in which our choices grow.
Coaching, at its heart, is a reorientation of attention. Not advice, not performance, but a re-tuning toward what matters. When clients begin to notice what gives energy and what drains it, what brings integrity and what breaks it, change becomes less of a fight and more of a remembering. The same is true of communities. When a town hall spends most of its time on blame, it becomes excellent at blame. When it spends time on listening and design, it becomes excellent at stewardship.
If attention is ecological, then the task is not to hoard it but to cultivate it. To make it fertile. To spend it where it grows, the conditions for more life, inside the home, on the block, in the watershed. We don’t need perfect focus to begin. We need better habits of noticing and the humility to admit when we’ve been looking away.
