You're In a War For Your Attention. You Should Probably Wear Armor.

Your attention is literally what your life is made of. The things you pay attention to, moment by moment, are what make up your experience of being alive.

One of the curses of the modern age is that our attention, our very life force, is under attack in a way it never has been before.

Billions of dollars, some of the smartest engineers in the world, and enormous technological infrastructure have been devoted to the task of getting you to spend just a little more time looking at a screen.

And what do you get in return?

Think about the time you spent scrolling yesterday. Can you remember even one specific post or reel you saw? What did all those minutes add up to?

We are giving away little pieces of our lives every day.

And yet, somehow, we treat the problem as a personal failure of discipline.

Every day we are participants in a war for our attention.

You wouldn't send a knight into battle in his underwear, would you?

Imagine telling him, "Well, maybe if you just tried harder, you wouldn't get hit."

Of course not.

He's going to get hit. That's the nature of warfare. Even the greatest swordsman in the world can't dodge every blow.

The question isn't whether he's going to get hit. It's what happens when he does.

That's why knights wear armor.

We should probably be wearing some too.

Not just a flimsy leather jerkin, either. I'm talking full plate armor. The kind that was a knight's most valuable possession.

Because when it comes to the war for your attention, much like a knight, your life is literally at stake.

So how do you build this attention armor? As with full plate armor, it has to be crafted to fit the individual. There is no "one size fits all."

Unlike plate armor, you can't hire someone else to build it for you. You have to do it yourself.

Here is my current armor setup. Maybe it will help you too.

1. Dopamine poisoning is real and stimulation has a long half-life

This first idea isn't software or hardware, it's a state of being that you have to master to really take your life back.

For a long time I was the kind of person who was either always reading or listening to something. Podcasts, Reddit, Hacker News, heck I even used random textbooks to fill the downtime. There was hardly ever a moment where I didn't have a screen or an earbud.

Then one day I decided to try to just suddenly cut off almost all external stimulation. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and my work.

I found that it was suddenly way easier to get started working. My brain didn't resist it as much because I wasn't going from a high stimulation environment (reading/listening) to a low stimulation one like working.

If anything, work had become more stimulating by comparison.

It is a shame that this strategy is so effective, because it isn't as much fun. It's often boring and it takes discipline. But it genuinely works.

One thing nobody talks about is how long it takes to "detox" from so much stimulation. Lots of people think that it takes a few minutes, but in my experience it takes between hours and days. Sure, you can do a lot in five minutes of meditation, but it takes longer than that for dopamine to really wear off.

So step one of the system is to realize that if you want to be at your absolute peak performance, you should very heavily filter the amount of external input you expose yourself to.

Even high quality input like great books should be limited. I'm not saying you can't read, I'm just saying that even reading should have a time and a place.

The problem is not only that lots of external input is attention-grabbing brain rot, it's that there is any external input at all. You should be alone with your thoughts a lot.

2. Use distraction blockers that can only be turned off with physical keys.

This is where the actual hardware and software start.

I remember when I first had the idea of installing software that blocked websites that took too much of my time. I felt euphoric. I was finally free.

It didn't take long though until I had figured out a way around it. Cold Turkey was my first one, and I realized I could use a Linux virtual machine to get around it. At first I was just curious, but once I knew how...

This pattern repeated itself with other blockers, both on my computer and my phone.

The bottom line is that there is always a way around a distraction blocker. And if there really wasn't, you would have to be careful about when you switched it on because you wouldn't want to accidentally lock yourself out of something you actually needed.

The solution that has actually worked for me is blockers that use physical devices. For my phone, I use Brick. For my desktop I use Talysman, an app I built because I really needed something like Brick but for my computer. I don't care which ones you actually use (okay I guess obviously I would prefer you used Talysman) I just really want you to have these types of blockers on your physical phone. I've heard good things about the Foqos app too, for blocking on the phone.

The beauty of these blockers is that a physical object is just the right amount of friction. Because you can always go get the key, your brain doesn't try to look for a workaround. Even if you did find one, the workaround only has to be more friction than getting the key, not more friction than going the entire rest of your "focus time" without access to whatever you blocked.

The counterintuitive truth is that you want turning off your blockers to be quick but difficult. Putting a physical object in another room is the perfect way to do this.

You should have these blockers running pretty much constantly. They will filter out 90% of incoming attacks on your attention.

3. Block short-form video by default

Short-form video is a plague upon our houses. Essentially brain poison.

The problem is that short-form video is embedded in useful apps like YouTube. I could theoretically just delete YouTube from my phone, but it is so genuinely useful a lot of the time that I want to keep it.

But if I have YouTube installed and available (for example if I want to use it for background music), it is so tempting to just pull out YouTube shorts when I want a distraction.

The solution is to use software that specifically blocks short-form content. For me on my phone that is an app called BlockScroll. It lets me use YouTube, Instagram, and other apps while blocking any short-form video content.

This eliminates the most dangerous parts of these apps.

BlockScroll only exists on Android, I'm not sure if there is an iOS app that does the same thing. If something like this isn't available, it is probably better to suffer the inconvenience of not having YouTube than to allow short-form video to have access to your brain. In the war against short-form video, the best way to win is not to play.

4. Soft blocking

Short-form video blocking apps work for your phone, but what about the desktop? On the desktop there is an especially strong pull towards using something like YouTube, because there is so much excellent background music.

The single best thing that happened to my relationship with YouTube was my discovery of a browser extension called Unhook. It modifies the YouTube UI by stripping out all the recommended videos. You have no feed, no "what to watch next." The only videos that show up are search results and the video you are currently watching. You can configure it to show/hide whatever you want, this is just the setup that works for me.

I call this form of blocking "soft blocking." You aren't blocking the website entirely, just removing the parts that actively attack your attention.

Soft blocking is best when sites are excellent libraries and tools, but very unhealthy as entertainment. In addition to YouTube, Reddit is a great example. Reddit posts regularly show up as results in Google searches. I want to be able to open a specific post, but not have the ability to browse and scroll. Soft blocking lets me do that by blocking everything that isn't a single specific post. Instagram is another example - it is great for DMs, but you don't want to waste time scrolling it. Soft blocking can give you access to DMs without showing the feed.

One thing about soft blocking is that it is way better on desktop than on the phone because most of the worst offending websites become apps on the phone and they are far less malleable than websites.

Talysman (my desktop blocker) has built-in support for soft blocking for a number of the worst attention sucking sites. There are also plenty of browser extensions that do the same thing on a per-site basis. Soft blocking is a super important part of the stack.

5. Give yourself a small number of breaks

One of the reasons soft blocking is so effective is that it allows you to go longer periods of time without needing to turn off your blocking software. This benefit brings me to my last layer in the stack.

While algorithmic sites are dangerous and should not be given free rein in your life, they do serve a purpose. Maybe you want to see what your friends are up to through Instagram, or follow AI news on Twitter/X. Or maybe you really do want the occasional hit of digital fentanyl (short-form video).

What you should not be doing is turning off your blockers when you want to use these sites. That is a recipe for losing multiple hours; straight to jail, do not collect $200.

A better solution is to have a number of timed blocker pauses you are allowed per day. For example you might allow yourself to pause for 10 minutes up to 3 times per day.

Because the algorithm usually shows you the best content right away, you'll actually be seeing most of the best stuff anyway without being stuck viewing mediocre content for hours afterwards.

Conclusion

The attention war is something you don't get to opt out of.

They're coming for you. Always.

Build yourself some armor. Close all the gaps. Protect yourself.