Every historical moment asks us to reconsider how we ought to live. Lately, I have wondered what an ethical life looks like in our own time. A time when we are more connected than any generation before us, yet lonelier. A time when we carry the world in our pockets, witnessing disasters, celebrations, and revolutions in real time. We know more about humanity than our ancestors could have imagined. Yet information has not made us wiser, and social media has not made us more compassionate.
We know that children are killed in wars, sometimes while attending school. We know that families go hungry, entire communities are displaced, anxiety and depression continue to rise, and inequality persists. These realities appear on our screens every day. Yet they disappear just as quickly, replaced by another headline, another video, another distraction. The suffering of others has become another piece of content to scroll past. What distinguishes our time is not that we watch these events together, but that we can witness them while feeling no obligation to respond.
What once might have shaken an entire society now competes with advertisements, celebrity gossip, political outrage, and curated distractions. Perhaps the defining crisis of our time is not ignorance but the erosion of attention.
Our attention is no longer entirely our own. It is shaped by algorithms designed not to help us flourish but to maximize engagement. They reward outrage, amplify division, and monetize insecurity. They encourage endless comparison while convincing us that happiness is one more purchase or one more viral moment away. They keep us consuming, competing, and distracted while promising that, with enough effort, we too might someday join those who designed the system.
Human attention has become an economic resource. The longer it can be captured, fragmented, and redirected, the more profitable it becomes.
We have become accustomed to a continuous present in which everything appears, disappears, and is immediately replaced. Memory gives way to novelty. Reflection yields to reaction. The speed with which information circulates has surpassed our capacity to think about it.
The irony is difficult to ignore. The more connected we become through technology, the more disconnected we become from ourselves, our neighbors, and the people whose lives our choices affect. Without sustained attention, compassion becomes sentiment, and political responsibility becomes performance. We become obedient without coercion because the very conditions for thoughtful resistance have been eroded.
Yet our world has become organized around preventing attention from remaining still.
We have accepted a life that often feels less like living than surviving. We are told to work more, produce more, and accumulate more. Many people carry the weight of multiple jobs and endless obligations, not because they desire excess, but because survival increasingly demands exhaustion. We work longer hours, believing that comfort lies just beyond the next promotion or purchase. We seek security so that we can finally rest, yet restorative time remains beyond our reach.
And then we arrive home.
We sink into a comfortable couch and stare into one screen after another until sleep overtakes us. Exhaustion becomes normal. Silence becomes unbearable. Entertainment becomes anesthesia.
Somewhere in the middle of the night, during those long hours of anxious insomnia, if only for a fleeting moment, we remember that something essential is missing. We sense that we have lost our soul. But before we can ask where it went, another notification appears, another episode begins, and another endless stream of content pulls us away from ourselves.
We do not lose ourselves all at once. We lose ourselves through thousands of small refusals to remain attentive.
A person incapable of sustained attention cannot truly encounter another person. To them, the afflicted become abstractions. The poor become statistics. The refugee becomes a political argument. The dead schoolchildren become one image among countless others, possessing no greater claim upon us than entertainment.
This is why ethics must be about protecting our humanity. It must ask whether our daily habits make us more capable of empathy or less. Whether our technologies serve human development or the erosion of our humanity. Whether our economic systems prioritize people or the accumulation of wealth. Whether we are becoming more awake to the lives of others or more numb.
Perhaps the greatest illusion of our time is that we assume technology has made us powerful. In truth, people who no longer govern their own attention have surrendered the very faculty through which freedom becomes possible.
Freedom does not begin with the ability to choose among infinite distractions. It begins with the ability to refuse them.
Injustice rarely succeeds because everyone agrees with it. It succeeds because too many people try to ignore it. We learn to live alongside suffering without allowing it to disturb our routines. We convince ourselves that someone else will care, someone else will speak, someone else will act.
An ethics for our times demands the opposite. It asks us to reclaim our attention because attention is the beginning of love. It asks us to look directly at suffering instead of scrolling past it, to measure success not by wealth or influence but by our capacity for compassion, and to choose presence over distraction, conversation over performance, and community over consumption.
Perhaps the most radical act today is to remain human: to refuse to let algorithms determine what deserves our attention, to refuse to let exploitation disguised as productivity define our worth, and to refuse to let the pain of strangers become invisible because it is far away or inconvenient.
We cannot save the entire world. But we can refuse to lose ourselves in a world that profits from our distraction. We can choose to notice. We can choose to care. We can choose to remain unsettled by injustice instead of growing comfortable with it.
To do so, we need spaces where silence is not immediately interrupted, where conversation is not a competition, and where people are valued for who they are rather than what they produce. We need relationships in which authenticity is safer than performance and curiosity is stronger than judgment.
An ethics for our time is, above all, an ethics of attention. For what we choose to notice shapes what we love, what we love shapes what we defend, and what we defend ultimately becomes the measure of our humanity.
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I will see you next week!
Roque Neto 