Can I have your attention please...

I know it’s already well into January, but like many people, I don’t think the year really starts until the noise settles. And certainly not on a Friday. Starting a new year of work on a Friday would be madness. Today feels about right. So, Happy New Year...

For two blissful weeks, most notifications were off. WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, email. Thank God for the mindfulness profile on iOS, which removes the clutter without making a ceremony of it.

What struck me most wasn’t rest, or even quiet. It was:

• The freedom to spend attention without it being pre-booked.
• To follow a thought until it ran out.
• To switch from one thing to another because it felt finished, not because something else was shouting louder. In work life, attention is scheduled, sliced, and reassigned constantly, like a relay baton you’re never allowed to drop. Take that structure away and you remember something easily forgotten:

Attention behaves very differently when it’s yours to place, rather than something you’re constantly defending.

Life was very relaxing. And cheese-filled.

I finally played board games with the kids that had been gathering dust for years, along with some new ones. The Traitors game was a huge disappointment, an exercise in pure faff. We watched films under a massive blanket in front of the fire. I started reading again. Not saving things for later. Just reading.

No time off would be complete without confronting the small domestic faults that only reveal themselves when you stop rushing past them. A squeaky door. A light switch that works, but only if you approach it carefully. The house stopped feeling like somewhere we passed through between obligations and started behaving like somewhere we lived.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, with no notifications dragging me elsewhere, I ended up spending time on Reddit again.

Long threads. Untidy arguments. People comparing notes about AI tools they’d actually used. What saved time. What created more work. What looked promising until it quietly caused problems a week later. You could see the wear marks on the recommendations.

It felt like wealth, though not the sort you can define. More that I could move between things at my own pace. Read for a bit. Fix something. Watch something. Drift. Stop. Start again. No frantic sense of falling behind. No digital cheese rolling downhill with me sprinting after it.

Then the break ended.

Coming back online felt like trying to start an old car you’d left untouched for months. You turn the key confidently. It clicks. Complains. Shows you a warning light you don’t recognise. Then, eventually, everything wakes up at once.

That first morning back was revealing. Messages everywhere. Threads I was apparently meant to have been following. A lot of activity insisting on urgency. Very little of it offering anything in return.

On Saturday, somewhere between clearing the inbox and wondering how any of this had ever felt normal, I read a Guardian article about Reddit overtaking TikTok in UK visits. I'd already skimmed Ofcom's Online nations report 2025, which is well worth trawling through

I can’t say I was surprised.

It described the same pattern I’d just lived through. When people want to fix something, work something out, or avoid getting something wrong, they look for places where the detail is intact and the truth hasn’t been polished away.

That’s what old forums did well. They assumed intent. You arrived with a problem. You stayed because someone else had already dealt with it. Reddit is that model, scaled and searchable.

Threads keep the working visible. Recommendations come with caveats. Disagreement stays attached to the point being argued. Over time, judgement accumulates rather than being washed away by the next refresh.

Facebook groups never quite managed this. Content sinks quickly. Context evaporates. Search is unreliable. Even when the answers are good, they’re hard to find again. The conversation resets before anything has time to compound. Google indexing probably plays its part, but the mechanics matter more than the algorithm.

After two weeks away, that distinction was hard to ignore.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events.” Marcus Aurelius

Notifications don’t create urgency. They present it. Most of the time, we accept without noticing there was a choice.

So, enough rambling, here's some uncommon sense, in plain terms

• Attention hasn’t shortened. It’s become selective.
• People will give time when effort leads somewhere concrete.
• Friction isn’t the problem. Futility is.
• Spaces that retain memory and context age better than those that constantly refresh.
• If something needs repeated prompts to land, the issue usually isn’t attention. The engine did start eventually. It always does. But coming back made it harder to ignore which journeys are worth taking, and which ones just burn fuel while making a lot of noise.