“The Attention Economy has Run me Ragged” is Part 1 in a four part series by members of Senspace, describing their experience with the Connection Paradox and visions for building a better, connected future. Part 1 is by Senspace Co-Founder and CEO, Ren Stern. Collect the article summary below.

For many of us, being on social media isn’t an option. As digital professionals and creatives, we need social media to keep up with the news, brand ourselves for our current and future employers or collaborators, and report to our friends that we’re alive and well. We wake up in the morning and check to see if anything changed in the world/see if anyone from another time zone liked our tweet overnight and go to bed by sign off by posting with an IG story of what we ate or who we had drinks with that night. We have hundreds if not thousands of “friends,” many of whom we can reach out to for an opinion on something, a zoom call or even work on a cool new project together. These friends might even be in an entirely different continent than you and it may be years before you actually meet them in person.

But despite the thousands of “friends,” hundreds of zoom meetings, meeting very cool and creative people in my day-to-day life in Tokyo, discussing topics of the day with brilliant, onchain and online minds and regular wins personally and professionally, I find myself battling this sensation that I’m trying to “make it” all alone.

I’m reminded of when I ran the New York Marathon in 2013. Around mile 21 as we the run came into Manhattan for its last stretch, I started to cramp up. With over five miles to go, I knew the rest of the run would be long. There were hundreds of other runners around me and crowds of people cheering, but I still felt alone in the crowd. It wasn’t just the race. I was in the first week of my new job, my first job as a college graduate, getting used to moving back home and trying to make long-distance work with my girlfriend from college. I remember thinking how much older and wiser all of the other runners around me looked and how they seemed unaffected by the moment as they waved and cheered back to the crowds that were cheering for them. Years later, I know now that the faces I was looking at were pretty snapshots amongst a bunch of much uglier moments in the marathon of life.

This sort of phenomenon happens today on social media today too. We see the fancy vacations, the cool parties people go to, the new deals people strike for their companies, and more recently the memecoin gains that someone might have gotten over the weekend (that you didn’t). This is because people don’t share the mundane moments (RIP: BeReal) or the L’s they take publicly. We’re instead bombarded by a wall of idyllic life photos, videos, multi-million dollar fundraises and more that form into one FOMO-inducing masterpiece. The more people, we get connected to digitally, the greater the masterpiece becomes, while social media companies spend billions of dollars to keep us looking.

With the sheer abundance of online personalities and content that’s recommended to us, it’s almost as if we’re running an infinite number of races against an infinite number of opponents. There’s always someone funnier, better looking, wealthier, with a better workout routine, better quips or that’s more successful, though they are likely not the same person. The results of these many games are quick and vicious, with results clearly visible through likes and follower counts. To win, you might feel the need to manufacture a “banger tweet” for the sake of being a banger, even if it may not reflect exactly how you feel.

On profiles that cross over between personal and professional, the need to walk the tightrope of being yourself and portraying a certain identity can be even more tedious. Being an interesting person outside of work can have significant professional benefits, but posting things that aren’t “professional” or tweeting things that aren’t company aligned can have the adverse effect. We might even be asked by our companies to promote new features of the app that we created or the apparel drop the company just released, whether we’re emotionally invested in the release, or not. Sharing and liking is now more often a job and obligatory pleasantry than an expression of your true interests. A Finsta or an anon X account for friends and unpopular opinions might start to solve for some of these issues, but we can still be doxxed and similar dynamics of liking as recognition (obligation) vs. liking as true appreciation or inspiration can still exist in private circles.

Some might think I’m making social media sound evil, but I believe these issues are just the natural result of the value and democratization of attention. Social media followings are powerful forms of social capital that can be used to sell our products, gain access to social and cultural events and legitimacy in a room. Anyone with an internet connection can post, seemingly giving everyone equal opportunity to access this power. With the emergence of memecoins, we can directly commercialize this attention with a realtime, liquid prediction market, which people seem to be doing with every conceivable moment in culture on pump.fun, supercharging the value of attention. The proliferation of AI also will mean vastly greater volumes of highly customized content, making our attention even harder to come by and in turn, even more valuable. An increase in the value of attention will only accelerate attention games, running many of us ragged.

A popular blanket term that describes the anxieties described in this essay is the Connection Paradox: the more connected we are, the less connected to society we feel. Touching grass and limiting screen time are great, but do not solve for the core issue underlying the Connection Paradox: the need, functionally and emotionally, to participate in the infinite attention games proliferated by social media. New social constructs, algorithms and platforms are needed to gives us the space to be our uncurated selves. New metrics need to be defined that reward us for how we make each other think, feel and make a true impact on each other’s lives on a deeper level.

It’s a big vision, but one that we believe is necessary to build a future that we want to be a part of.

The Alpha version of Senspace was built as an anonymous, ephemeral chat app to remove all context from connecting with others and we plan to iterate on this based on early user feedback and ongoing research.

Join our waitlist at senspace.xyz to be an early tester of the Beta version of Senspace launching in Q1 2025 or feel free to dm me @renstern_eth on X to give us your thoughts on tackling the Connection Paradox.

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