Pay Attention! Think!
“ Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl penned this line after being released from Nazi concentration camps where he’d endured three years of hard labour. Some of you might know he wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning in just nine days after being released. He argued that he’d survived, while hundreds of thousands of fellow prisoners perished, because of his ability to not be distracted by others’ impositions on his thinking. He made the conscious and deliberate choice to own that space between what was happening around him and how he was going to live.
Today, though, we live in an “attention economy.” The more-more-more system tosses us bread and circuses and has bought our ability to think clearly. A bunch of super smart people working in behemoth tech companies design products to drag our attention away from true connecting by keeping us on an addictive, hedonistic treadmill of human smallness, buying their products. Over 90 percent of the data in the world today was generated in just the previous two years. We are inundated with the
