The Strange Reason We All Seem So Tired

Something doesn't add up.

We've spent more than a century making life easier. We don't haul water. We don't hunt dinner. We don't wash our clothes by hand. We push buttons, tap screens, order groceries from the couch and complain when Amazon takes two days.

We have engineered an astonishing amount of effort out of being alive.

So why the hell is everyone exhausted?

I wrote an entire book a few years ago called Eat Like an Entrepreneur around one stubborn idea: you don't need more time, you need more energy. I still believe that.

But lately I've started wondering whether I missed half the equation.

I spent all that time thinking about how we create energy. I wasn't paying nearly enough attention to what might be taking it.

I've had an unusual seat from which to watch people. I played professional soccer, which introduced me to a lot of old world (energy) medicine… teaching me to feel energy from inside the body—adrenaline, focus, recovery, exhaustion. I spent fifteen years as a pastor, sitting with people through marriages, deaths, addictions, successes, failures and all the other beautiful and terrible things humans do. And for more than a decade I've worked in hospitality, where thousands of people move through the businesses I'm involved with every week.

You see things.

Lately, I keep seeing tired people.

There are a hundred reasonable explanations for this. We sleep badly. We eat badly. We work too much. We move too little. We're lonely, stressed, overcommitted and worried about money.

I'm sure all of that matters.

But I can't stop wondering about something else:

What if we made life physically easier at almost exactly the same time we made it neurologically impossible?

I've spent the majority of the last decade around a family that pioneered media in America. Their history runs through newspapers, radio and television, so I've occasionally been close enough to hear very smart people wrestle with a question worth billions of dollars:

Where have all the eyeballs gone?

The eyeballs, of course, haven’t gone anywhere.

We did.

Our attention moved, and the economy followed.

Gary Vaynerchuk calls the strategy of following those movements "day trading attention." I think he's right. I'm an entrepreneur. I advertise. I create content. I study engagement. I want people to stop scrolling when something from one of my businesses crosses their screen.

I'm not standing outside the machine throwing rocks at it.

I'm in it.

But lately I've become fascinated by the other side of the trade.

Businesses have become incredibly sophisticated at asking where our attention is going. I'm not sure we've been nearly as curious about what all this competition might be doing to the person it's coming from.

Consider what an ordinary human being can encounter before lunch: a text from their kid, an email from the boss, a war, a puppy, a murder, someone's vacation, a political scandal, their checking-account balance, a stranger's abs, a tornado warning, a funny video and an advertisement for shoes they looked at once and are now apparently expected to consider until death.

Then lunch.

That's different.

I don't mean bad. I mean different.

For almost all of human history, nothing remotely like this existed. Now some of the smartest companies, engineers, marketers, creators and algorithms on earth compete every day for access to a finite biological resource inside us.

Our attention.

That's not a conspiracy. It’s an economy.

And economies have consequences beyond the things they optimize.

Attention isn't oil or real estate or Bitcoin. It's something your brain and body do. Which raises a question I don't think we've spent nearly enough time asking:

What does an economy optimized for capturing attention do to the human organism sustaining it?

I don't know. I'm serious about that.

I'm not going to tell you TikTok gave somebody anxiety or Instagram ruined somebody's marriage. Human beings are far too complicated for that.

What I have are observations.

A toddler coming apart when the tablet dies. A family sitting together while everyone is somewhere else. A teenager struggling with a problem that won't resolve quickly. A nurse beside a dying man whose hand keeps drifting toward her phone. A grandfather shortening a bedtime story because his grandson keeps saying, "Skip to the good part." A paramedic reaching for a phone that never vibrated.

I've started writing these things down. Not as evidence. As notes.

Over the next several weeks, I want to put those observations beside what neuroscience, psychology, economics, immunology and history actually tell us. Some of the research may support what I'm seeing. Some may tell me I'm looking in the wrong direction.

Good. 

I'm not building a case. 

I'm keeping a journal.

There's an old story about two fish swimming along when an older fish passes and asks, "How's the water?"

They keep swimming until one finally looks at the other and asks:

"What's water?"

I've told the story for years.

I'm beginning to think the most powerful part isn't the fish. It's the water.

The forces that shape us most may not be the ones we are most aware of or even fight against. They may be the ones we've lived inside long enough to stop seeing.

So maybe that's where we start.

Not by throwing away our phones. Not by blaming technology. Not by pretending the past was better.

Just by looking at the water.