Five minutes with Bob · Posted by Bob · October 20, 2026

Information Or Attention?

This morning, I caught myself wondering about something rather uncomfortable. How much of what we read every day actually makes our lives better? An earthquake in one country. A celebrity’s latest controversy. A stranger’s opinion about something we had never thought about until five minutes ago. We read. We scroll. We watch. And before we know it, another hour has disappeared. You sit down with the morning newspaper and coffee, intending to read for fifteen minutes. One headline leads to another. A distant disaster catches your attention. An argument between politicians draws you in. Your coffee gets cold. Your partner has finished breakfast. And the conversation you might have shared has quietly disappeared. The little red notification Your phone lights up while you’re having dinner with your family. You glance at it. It’s a news alert. One minute becomes ten. Your daughter has stopped telling you about her day. Your spouse has returned to eating in silence. Nothing dramatic has happened. Nobody has argued. But a little piece of togetherness has gone missing. The family sitting in the same room Everyone is home. The children are around, your partner is nearby, and perhaps a parent is waiting to tell you a story you’ve heard before. Yet each person is looking at a different screen. You’re all physically together, but your attention is somewhere else. It’s a strange thing about modern life. We can be connected to thousands of people and still miss the person sitting right beside us. Of course information is important. Knowing what is happening in the world matters. Understanding a crisis, learning something new, or staying informed can be genuinely valuable. The question is not whether we should read the news. It is whether everything that competes for our attention deserves an equal share of it. There is a difference between information that helps us understand the world and information that simply occupies our minds. We may read ten more updates about a distant event and remain unable to change anything about it. Meanwhile, a conversation with our mother might reveal that she has been feeling lonely. A few uninterrupted minutes with our partner might help us understand what has been troubling them. Listening to a child might give us a glimpse of a world that is becoming more complicated for them. These moments rarely arrive with a notification. They don't flash across a screen or demand our attention. And yet, they may matter far more to the lives we actually live. Think about it this way. An hour spent reading unnecessary updates is not merely an hour spent consuming information. It is also an hour that could have been spent laughing with your spouse, listening to your father tell that familiar old story, or asking a friend how they are really doing. We often say that our relationships need more time. Perhaps some of us already have that time. Perhaps it is simply being spent elsewhere. And the irony is that the people closest to us may never complain. They may understand our busy lives. They may wait for us to finish scrolling, reading, or watching. But waiting is not the same as being with someone. Time is one of the quietest ways we tell people that they matter to us. I wonder what might happen if we became a little more selective about the information we allowed into our day. Not because the world doesn't matter, but because our own little corner of it matters, too. The people we love are living through their own earthquakes, droughts, disappointments, discoveries, and small victories. We might miss those stories while following everyone else's. Perhaps it is a good idea to assess how much of your time you spent consuming unnecessary information, which you could’ve given instead to someone you love. What might that time have meant to them? Until tomorrow, Bob