Attention Is Earned
Why stories deserve better than algorithms, prestige, and cultural hierarchy.
learned something growing up on a small island that I have never been able to unlearn.
Attention is earned.
Where I grew up, television was never endless. Signals disappeared. Channels came and went. Storms interrupted broadcasts. Blackouts were ordinary. Watching something required patience, and finishing it often required luck.
Stories were not background noise. They were events.
Years later, I built The Unconventional Curator on what that scarcity taught me: the value of a story has nothing to do with prestige, awards, or algorithms. Taste is not a credential. It is cultivated.
This is TUC's founding essay, the philosophy behind everything published here.
