Dr. Zelana Montminy

Technology and our sort of productivity culture that glorifies like constant busyness has essentially rewired our brain completely.

for task switching and fragmentation, which leaves us emotionally exhausted.

We have tons of unresolved grief and it's really eroding our capacity to sustain attention, to be present for ourselves and each other.

And so we live through this, like this world of disconnection and depletion.

And so that's why I wrote the book because our attention has been hijacked and

as someone else's profit margin.

But the cost isn't just productivity, which most people think about when they think about focus.

It's actually the real cost.

The more expensive cost is the presence, the empathy, and the meaning that we've lost touch with.

And I think you've hit the nail.

I do think it is a crisis of mattering.

And I love that lens.

I do think that focus and attention is actually even deeper than that.

The crisis of attention that we're in, it's almost like a prerequisite for mattering because you can't feel that you matter.

You can't experience belonging or mattering.

If you're not aligned with other people, if you're not connecting deeply with others, mattering is actually relational.

So it requires connections and attunement.

And when our collective attention is hijacked by all the noise, by all the metrics, the distractions, the things we say yes to, we can't even experience, we don't have the presence of mind to even know we matter.

right, because it's mattering is such an emotional thing, but I feel like attention and focus is even, it's almost like,

more existential it's like i mattering is about not feeling significant and attention really is also about i can't even i don't even know my version of reality like how many times a day do people come home and they don't even know what they've done for the day like they just are on autopilot because they're not attuned they're not paying attention they're not focused on any one activity like we drive home without knowing where we're going and we just arrive