The truly scarce resource in the AI era isn't information, isn't knowledge, isn't even compute.
It's human attention span.
Attention.
In the pre-internet era, our pain was: "Too little information, can't find anything."
Now the AI era has flipped it completely. The things you want to read, would love to read, find genuinely valuable in a lifetime — already far exceed the limited bandwidth of the human brain.
The result? Our attention drifts randomly. Randomly assigned to whichever tiny fragment happens to crash into our field of vision.
Many of you know this feeling. Take my bookmarks folder. It's stuffed with: articles, videos, papers, podcasts, technical materials that I "plan to seriously read someday."
The moment I bookmarked them, I genuinely believed: "This is worth my time to digest."
But if I didn't get sucked in right then — if I didn't ride that wave and read it through — it was almost certainly lost forever. Sure, formally it's still there. Still on your radar. Theoretically reachable anytime. But your brain has long since turned the page.
So much of what we call "saving" isn't actually reading. It's a psychological comfort: "I have approached the knowledge."
Here's the absurdity of modern society. Humanity is drowning in information overload. And AI is amplifying this trend tenfold.
Because in the past, the flood of information was at least constrained by: the speed at which humans produce content.
Now agents can work for you 24/7: generating, summarizing, forwarding, distributing, repurposing, rewriting, running accounts. Diligently. Tirelessly.
But here's the problem. The world's information production speed has begun to far exceed humanity's "information digestion" speed.
As a result, high-quality content going unnoticed will increasingly become the norm of the information society.
Stop fantasizing that: "As long as I'm diligent enough, hardworking enough, my content is good enough, I will surely be seen." The peach tree doesn't speak, yet a path forms beneath it. That's not how it works.
Going viral is often luck. Partly marketing. Mostly platform promotion.
Because the attention economy, at its core, is: platforms using algorithms to manipulate and allocate humanity's limited attention. And it's terrifyingly effective.
Because platforms aren't just better at understanding content. They're better at understanding human nature. Humans are creatures of inertia. Whatever the platform pushes, most people just watch. Busy? Scroll. Tired? Scroll. Killing time? Scroll.
We end up in a bizarre era: masses of people frantically producing content, hoping others will notice them. Meanwhile, everyone's attention is simultaneously going bankrupt.
So the truly healthy creative mindset for the future should be: you have something to express. You want to put it out there. That's enough.
Stop clinging to: "It must reach many people."
Aside from your closest friends and family, the fate of most content in this era was always to be swept away by the flood.
