How We Got Here: Chapter 8

how we got here Jul 13, 2026

The War for Your Attention

Estimated Read Time: 12 Minutes

Last week we followed the money through modern healthcare. Chronic disease as an economic engine, statins, GLP-1 medications, the incentives that reward treatment over prevention. By the end of it one thing kept nagging at me. None of those products become billion-dollar industries simply because they exist. Before someone asks their doctor about a medication, orders the food, or downloads the app, something else has to happen first.

They have to notice it.

A few weeks ago I was standing in line at the grocery store and noticed something.

Nobody was doing nothing.

Every single person had their phone out. The guy in front of me. The woman behind me. Teenagers. Parents. Even the cashier glanced at a screen between customers. Ten years ago, standing in line meant standing in line. Maybe you looked at the magazines by the register. Maybe you watched people. Maybe you just waited. Thirty seconds of idle time was just thirty seconds of idle time.

I stood there thinking about when exactly that changed. Not the technology itself, I know when smartphones arrived. What I kept wondering was when boredom became something we were no longer willing to experience. When did a quiet moment stop feeling like a break and start feeling like a problem to solve?

Advertising has always competed for attention. That part isn't new.

Newspapers sold space to merchants. Radio handed audiences to sponsors. By the time television arrived, the commercial break was just part of the deal, everyone accepted it without much thought. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew (yes, that Freud), and one of the early architects of the public relations industry, understood something in the 1920s that the entire advertising world eventually built its business around. The connection wasn't coincidental. Bernays took his uncle's core idea, that human behavior is driven more by unconscious desires and fears than by rational thinking, and applied it directly to selling products. Instead of explaining why something was good, you attached it to something people already wanted to feel. A cigarette didn't have to be sold as tobacco wrapped in paper. It could be sold as independence.

In 1929, Bernays hired women to march in New York's Easter parade and publicly light cigarettes at a coordinated moment. Women smoking in public was considered scandalous at the time, so the act itself was news. He called the cigarettes "Torches of Freedom" and fed the phrase to the press, framing the whole thing as an act of women's liberation. Newspapers ran it everywhere. He had taken a product with no connection to feminism or independence and attached it to both. Bernays wasn't trying to explain the cigarette. He was changing what it meant.

Modern advertising rarely limits itself to describing what something is. It tells us what the product represents and who we might become by using it. Beer becomes friendship. A truck becomes freedom. Fast food becomes comfort. A prescription medication becomes the sunny afternoon, the family gathering, the hiking trip, the version of life that illness seems to have taken away.

The drug commercial is especially strange once you step outside the American media environment. The United States and New Zealand are the only wealthy countries that broadly allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise prescription medications directly to the public. In most comparable countries, prescription drugs are marketed to medical professionals rather than placed between commercials for chicken wings and car insurance. Here it's become so normal that a viewer can hear about a medication for a condition they didn't know existed, watch actors resume a joyful life after taking it, absorb thirty seconds of frightening side effects read at speed, and barely register the sequence as unusual.

Americans now spend roughly twice as much per person on prescription drugs as people in comparable wealthy countries. That gap widened sharply after direct-to-consumer advertising became legal in the late 1990s.

From 2016 through 2018, pharmaceutical companies spent nearly eighteen billion dollars advertising prescription drugs directly to American consumers. Almost half of that spending promoted medications for chronic conditions including diabetes, arthritis, and depression. Research shows those advertisements increase patient requests, and those requests can influence what gets prescribed. Companies don't spend eighteen billion dollars on a strategy with no effect.

I see a smaller version of this in my own business. If I end an Instagram video by asking people to like, save, or follow, more people do. Not because anyone has been manipulated, but because prompts work. Human beings respond to them. Good marketers know that. Pharmaceutical companies know it too. That's why almost every drug commercial ends the same way: ask your doctor if this medication is right for you. They aren't hoping you'll ask. They're making sure you do.

Researchers studying televised prescription drug advertising found emotional appeals in nearly every commercial examined. Not one presented lifestyle change as an alternative to medication. The medication was framed as the gateway back to recreation, relationships, confidence, the life the viewer wanted to live. The product wasn't simply treating a biological condition. It was being attached to the story of feeling like yourself again.

Advertising had learned how to shape meaning long before the internet arrived. What the internet changed was something more fundamental.

It made attention measurable.

For most of history, businesses had no reliable way to know whether their advertising worked. A company could spend millions on a Super Bowl commercial watched by a hundred million people. A magazine could promise advertisers a million subscribers. A billboard could sit beside the busiest highway in America. They could estimate exposure, but what happened after that was largely invisible. Did someone actually pay attention? Did they remember it a week later? Did it change what they bought? Nobody really knew.

Then the internet changed the rules.

For the first time, attention became something that could be tracked in real time. Every click, every search, every second spent on a page became information. Whether someone finished an article or abandoned it halfway through. Whether they skipped an ad or paused on it. Whether they looked at a product and bought it or looked at it and moved on. All of it suddenly visible, and none of it had ever been visible before.

Companies could test hundreds of advertisements simultaneously. One headline generated more clicks than another. One image held attention an extra three seconds. One phrase convinced more people to stop scrolling. Every interaction became feedback. Millions of tiny experiments ran every single day, most of them invisible to the people participating in them. The winning version stayed. The losing version disappeared. Then the next experiment began.

The question eventually shifted from how do we make people aware of our product to something different.

How do we become the thing they can't stop looking at?

Once that became the objective, every additional second someone spent on a screen had direct financial value. Another minute meant another chance to show an advertisement. Another advertisement meant another chance to influence a decision. Attention wasn't just a pathway to revenue anymore.

Attention had become the product itself.

Some of the largest companies in the world don't manufacture food, cars, medicine, or clothing. In 2024, Meta generated roughly two hundred billion dollars in advertising revenue. Alphabet, Google's parent company, generated more than three hundred billion. Social media and search are just the delivery mechanism. What they're actually selling is access to the people using them.

The engineers building these products weren't designing them to be harmful. But somewhere in those product meetings, someone absolutely decided people should spend more time on the platform. That was the goal. Every feature that followed was built to serve it. Infinite scroll removed the natural stopping point at the bottom of a page. Autoplay started the next video before anyone decided whether they wanted it. Personalized recommendations filled the gap between one piece of content and the next. Push notifications created reasons to return even after someone had left. Streaks made stopping feel like losing something.

Each feature, viewed individually, seems almost helpful. Autoplay saves a button press. Infinite scroll means no page breaks. Notifications keep you from missing something important. But together, they created an environment where someone else is constantly deciding what deserves your attention next. Over time, you stop directing your own attention as often because something else has become extraordinarily good at directing it for you.

The legal system has started catching up to this in ways that feel familiar.

Beginning in 2022, hundreds of lawsuits were filed against Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Snap alleging that their platforms were deliberately engineered to be addictive and harmful, particularly to young users. More than forty state attorneys general joined the effort. Thousands of individual cases followed. In March 2026, a Los Angeles jury delivered the first verdict of its kind, finding Meta and YouTube liable for harm caused to a young user by their addictive design features. Meta was ordered to pay seventy percent of a six-million-dollar judgment, YouTube the remaining thirty.

The plaintiff's lawyers described it as "a historic moment." But what caught my attention wasn't the verdict itself. It was the language the lawsuit used to describe what these companies had done. The complaint stated that the platforms, borrowing heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry, deliberately embedded features aimed at maximizing youth engagement to drive advertising revenue.

The cigarette industry.

I didn't plan that connection when I started writing this series. A few weeks back we traced how tobacco companies quietly bought their way into the food industry in the 1980s, bringing decades of expertise in habit formation, repeat consumption, and engineering products people couldn't easily stop using. That was the first clue. Several episodes later, a jury is using those exact same companies as the benchmark for what Meta and YouTube allegedly did to an entirely different generation.

I genuinely didn't see that coming. But the lawsuit's own language made clear it wasn't a coincidence. These techniques were borrowed, studied, and applied. The playbook was the same. Only the product changed.

I catch myself doing it constantly.

I'll pick up my phone to check the weather before a walk. A notification appears. I answer a text. I remember an email. I open Instagram for what I tell myself will be a minute. Twenty minutes disappear and I genuinely couldn't tell you where they went. Most people reading this have experienced some version of that sequence. The details change, but the structure is the same.

We've become so accustomed to filling quiet moments that silence has started to feel uncomfortable. We check our phones while standing in line. We scroll during television commercials. We watch something on one screen while looking at another. Even waiting at a red light feels like an invitation to check what's happening somewhere else. I can't remember the last time I sat in a waiting room and simply waited.

Our brains are naturally drawn to novelty. New information has always captured human attention. Throughout our evolutionary history, something new in the environment could be important for survival. The difference now is that we no longer encounter novelty occasionally. We carry an infinite supply of it in our pockets. Every swipe offers something different, a new video, another headline, a different opinion, another notification, and the stream never ends because it was never designed to end.

The U.S. Surgeon General has identified features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and personalized recommendations as design elements that encourage longer engagement. Research on attention has found that frequent interruptions and constant task-switching are associated with greater stress and reduced capacity to focus. The environments most of us spend our days inside were built to compete for one thing above everything else.

Our attention.

We've become less practiced at directing our own attention because we're constantly letting something else do it for us.

I thought about that TV commercial sequence. Beer. Fast food. Sports betting. Pickup truck. Prescription medication. Most of us have watched something like that lineup so many times that we barely process it anymore. But look at what's actually happening.

Every company in that commercial break is fighting over the same thing.

The beer company needs your attention long enough to connect its product with friendship and a good time. The fast-food company needs it long enough to make dinner feel like an obvious decision. The sportsbook needs it long enough to make an ordinary game feel incomplete without a wager. The pharmaceutical company needs it long enough to introduce a condition you might recognize in yourself and leave a product name somewhere accessible before your next doctor's appointment.

And all of them, apparently, need to be significantly louder than the show you were actually watching. The FCC has been receiving complaints about TV commercials being louder than regular programming since the 1960s. Congress passed a law about it in 2010. Then streaming arrived and the whole problem started over because the law didn't cover streaming. California had to pass a separate state law in 2025. Sixty years of legislators chasing advertisers who keep finding new ways to be louder than whatever you were trying to watch.

Different products. Same contest.

Tobacco companies entered the food industry and brought decades of expertise in habit formation and repeat consumption. The sugar industry funded research to shift public focus away from sugar. Food companies engineered products to hit the precise combination of ingredients that made them difficult to stop eating. Pharmaceutical companies developed medications that managed chronic conditions without resolving the lifestyle factors driving them, then advertised those medications directly to patients on prime-time television. Social media platforms built features designed to make stopping feel like a minor loss every time you tried.

Every industry in this series was solving the same upstream problem first. Before you can sell someone food, or a medication, or a membership, or a worldview, you need their attention. Attention is the gateway. Everything else comes after.

Writing this series has changed how I think about my own work.

Every recommendation I've made as a coach for twenty years has, in one way or another, been about reclaiming attention. Go for a walk without your phone. Cook a meal and pay attention to what's in it. Sleep without a screen in the room. Lift weights and actually notice how your body feels. Have a conversation that isn't competing with a notification.

I never framed it that way before. I called it health. But health, I think, begins with attention. You can't change what you don't notice. You can't improve what you're not paying attention to. The first step in every meaningful health change I've ever watched someone make was the moment they actually started paying attention to what they were doing and how it was affecting them.

The industries we've covered all share one thing. They work better when people aren't paying close attention to the tradeoffs. The processed food business benefits when people don't think too carefully about what's in the bag. The pharmaceutical economy benefits when patients trust the advertisement more than the lifestyle option. The attention economy benefits when scrolling feels automatic rather than chosen.

That's the war for your attention. Not a battle between you and a specific company. A competition among dozens of industries for the most valuable resource in modern life, what you choose to do with the next moment you have.

We've spent eight weeks following separate clues. Food. Nutrition. Cooking. Movement. Healthcare. Economics. Attention. Each one seemed like its own story at first. But they're all expressions of the same thing.

Before someone can change what you eat, what you buy, what you believe, or what medication you ask your doctor about, they have to earn your attention first. Every story in this series began there. Which means protecting your health might start with something simpler than any supplement, any program, or any prescription.

Protecting your attention.

Next week we pull all of it together. Not just the clues. The pattern underneath all of them.

I'm Coach Andy, founder of Protean Fitness. If this series is resonating with you, follow along on Instagram and LinkedIn, or join the Protean Wellness Community.

Sources:

How We Got Here: Chapter 8

The War for Your Attention

Two Step