Notes from the Exit: Why I Left the Attention Economy

I didn’t leave the attention economy because I hated it. I left because I understood it, because once you see the system for what it is—a parasitic loop that rewards noise over nuance, metrics over meaning, reaction over reflection—you have two choices. Keep optimizing for reach, or start optimizing for resonance.

At some point, every creator hits a wall - it’s not burnout exactly. It’s misalignment. You find yourself fluent in a language you no longer believe in, you know how to hack the algorithm, when to post, what to say, how to craft the dopamine-hooked headline. You’ve learned to manufacture the kind of work that gets rewarded, but somewhere in the process you forget why you started making it at all.

The economy of attention doesn’t ask what you think; it asks how fast you can say it, how loud, and how often. And if you play long enough, you stop making anything for the people you care about and you start making it for the feed. The result is a race to the bottom with a leaderboard, a machine that needs to be fed even if it’s chewing up your integrity.

So I stopped. I didn't ragequit. I didn't issue a manifesto. I just started building a system that didn’t require me to sell my thoughts for spare change. I switched from social performance to sovereign publishing. I traded growth hacks for depth. I started writing slower. Longer. Weirder. Truer.

And here’s the irony: when I stopped chasing eyeballs, I started building trust. When I ditched the algorithm, I found an audience. Not a crowd—an audience. People who don’t just scroll past, but actually stop. Read. Think. Reply. People who aren’t here for the dopamine drip, but for the clarity, the insight, the invitation to opt out too.

Leaving the attention economy doesn’t mean vanishing. It means choosing to matter to fewer people, more deeply. It means owning the means of distribution. It means publishing like a human being instead of a content mill. It means you stop playing to the house odds and start building your own game.

If you’re still in it, I get it. It’s designed to be sticky. There are metrics that feel like progress. There are micro-rewards that mimic success. But if you’re waking up tired, cynical, or worse—numb—then maybe it's time to find your exit.

Mine was simple: I stopped selling my attention, and started buying back my freedom. That changed everything.

The goal was never to win the algorithm. The goal was to not need it at all.