You Don’t Know I’m Gone

This title sounds a little morbid, but it’s not. It makes me a little sad though when I think about the context. Here is what I mean. I have been off Facebook for almost three months now, and I haven’t even noticed everything that I’ve missed.

In reality, even when I was on Facebook, I didn’t get updates on all the several hundred friends that I had. The algorithms limited my view to the few dozen or so people that I interacted with or that Facebook determined that I would be interested in. I honestly couldn’t tell you which friends I was and was not hearing from. This seems to be a theme today. The loud and repeated things are deemed important and take up all of our attention. The importance of some things gets so inflated while others fall through unnoticed. There are so many things that we don’t even realize that we miss.

This is my point, you don’t notice I’m gone. There is so much noise and people vying for your attention that you probably haven’t wondered to yourself lately, “I wonder where Angelo went?”

This is fine, it also makes me think about the things that I have let fall through the cracks in my life because something louder or more visible took up my attention. Even if it wasn’t the most important thing to me, it took up the space of something else that I probably had more involvement or interest in.

So that’s it, just a thought. You don’t know I’m gone and I am sitting here starting to realize that people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin are 100% correct when they say that the currency of the present time is attention. What do I not know is gone or overshadowed in my life because I am letting someone purchase and influence my attention and focus?