In a session this morning, a client was mentioning how he hasn't read much about Trump in the news lately and is wondering if everyone has finally moved on. I don't know, as I barely read the news as it is, but this broke into a discussion about interests and how our attention gets continually drawn towards "interests" that do not bring much of value to us. The news is a great example of this.
Every day, they give us something that they consider will draw our attention and we will attend to it, regardless of whether it relates to our own areas of interests. Then, they will deliver another interesting into our view for us to attend to again and while we might feel like we are learning something or even participating, we don't actually add any relevant skills in order to affect conditions, it is pure consumption.
I used the example of a person interested in learning an instrument, where every day they pick up a different instrument for half an hour. A piano today, a violin tomorrow, a banjo the day after. After a year, they have "experience" with 365 instruments. Their "interest" in learning an instrument feels fed each day, but can't play any of them, they are completely ineffective as a musician, as there has been no actual skill development as skills like this take time to develop.
I think a lot of society has a type of engineered attention deficit disorder, where we are made to feel that we are not keeping up, not learning, unless we are continually paying attention to the incoming stream of random in the world. This constant shift in focus means that we are not only unable to build skills that take time to develop, we are less likely to have the skill in patience and the will and drive required to do so, which supports the instant gratification life, not the delayed gratification lifestyle, where the ability to delay gratification is one of the most accurate indicators of success.
The reason is, that value takes time to build and if it is continually bled before that value can grow significantly, it will never benefit from the multiplier of things like compound interest. Delaying gratification allows for value to build, whether it be monetary like an investment into a stock, or physical, like an investment into the development of a skill.
The next issue is that when everyone is drawn by what the media considers interesting, the value of knowing that information goes down, as everyone knows it. The only advantage in knowing it, is when there is a skill that can be utilized to take advantage of the situation, which requires, already having the skill or the resource available to invest, which means having developed it in the past - which requires having been "interested enough" to learn, before it is advertised.
What we consume seems to be increasingly irrelevant to our skill requirements, but it keeps drawing our attention into it over and over, even though it gives us no return. Our attention is the most valuable resource we have at our disposal and the personal value of it is going to be directly correlated to how we choose to spend it.
When we sit ourselves in front of "suppliers" who will drive a stream of random through our awareness, we are not in control of what we are actually consuming - like sitting in front of the TV without a a remote, too lazy to get up and change the channel - or go and do something else. Except now, we have the choice of so many suppliers of interesting things, that we never even have the chance to get bored enough to go and find something else to do and remain transfixed by all of the "attention grabbing" consumer content.
Interest
a benefit, advantage, a being concerned or affected (advantageously)
it is of importance, it makes a difference
When we show interest in something we consume, it often isn't meeting the definition of being "interesting" as it is not affecting us advantageously, nor is it making a difference. Even the term "importance" requires movement, but if we are not moving, even the most important articles in the news are not, as they were not able to get us to do anything about them. Other than a place to spend our attention, there is very little development of value in consumption.
I am hopeful that in time this can change, but I think it should be remembered that being a pure consumer won't likely ever amount to much of an ROI for the consumer. To earn from consumption requires investment of value in, so that it can effectively be considered ownership of something that generates value. This means that to earn, a consumer has to have access to value, outside of their own attention, they have to be attractive themselves. Money attracts money, because it draws attention from those who need it and are willing to pay for access to it.
Personally, I get the sense that a lot of our world is kind of like artificial sweetener, it has the characteristics of sugar, but isn't sugar. Much of what we consume has the characteristics of being important and worthy of our attention, but do not actually satisfy the requirements to get us to move, meaning our interest in them is not interest at all. Yet, because it doesn't actually satisfy our core needs, we are still hungry and keep consuming, hoping that the next interesting shiny bauble that grabs our attention, is going to be the one that delivers us value.
At the end of the day however, it is up to each of us to spend our attention as we please, but those of us who no longer have the skills in the attention bank to make the choices for ourselves, we will be relegated to the consumer class, and have very little chance to escape. Without the ability to attend to our own decision making or have the patience to invest into what is actually interesting, we will never have enough resource to generate value for ourselves.
When we think about "living off the interest" we look at how much we need to have as the principle to earn the interest upon. What is very rarely talked about though is the attention it takes to develop the principle amount in the first place.
Living off interest requires earning on the resources generated from where we invest our attention.