Today, human attention has become an object of struggle and consumption. It is captured by politicians, markets, religious structures, ideologies, and media — each in its own way, but following the same logic: to use, direct, retain, and redistribute it. Human attention has turned into a resource for which constant competition is waged, while almost no one asks what is actually happening to the human being in this process.
Modern power, in whatever form it exists, addresses a person not as a living being with an inner life, but as an instrument. Fear is needed for control, loyalty for stability, exhaustion for submission. People are drawn into conflicts, called to hostility, fed images of enemies, pitted against groups, religions, and cultures — all while constantly speaking about security, necessity, and higher goals. This unfolds against an almost complete lack of interest in the human being as a source of life, meaning, and future.
What is most striking is that those who make decisions possess enormous resources. There are budgets, analytics, technologies, access to data, and the ability to hear millions of voices and observe real processes in society. Yet instead of asking a simple human question — what does a person need right now in order to feel grounded and meaningful — these resources are directed toward increasing pressure, stimulating consumption, and generating new reasons for fear and tension.
People are constantly told whom they should hate, what they should fear, what they must support, and what they must submit to. Their freedoms are restricted under the pretext of protection, destruction is justified by necessity, and aggression is masked as care. And yet people are almost never asked what they truly want — not from imposed agendas, not from fear of exclusion, but genuinely, with their whole soul and heart.
Gradually, a quiet but dangerous shift takes place. A person stops feeling that they are needed as a human being. They are needed as a voter, a soldier, a consumer, a taxpayer, a statistic — but not as a living bearer of meaning. Their inner voice loses its significance, and eventually they themselves stop expecting that this voice could ever be heard.
It is precisely at this moment that the deepest fracture of our time emerges. Not in economics and not in politics, but in the loss of connection between the human being and the reality in which they live. When a person no longer believes that their life, their effort, and their inner orientation truly matter to anyone, any calls for unity, stability, or future begin to sound empty.
If power were genuinely interested in sustainability, it would begin not with control, propaganda, or appeals. It would begin with a question — quiet, simple, and human. A question about what a person needs in order to live, not merely survive, and how they envision the future of their children.
But this question turns out to be the most uncomfortable one. Because once it is asked seriously, it is no longer possible to limit oneself to management. Responsibility must be taken.