We make appointments to exercise. We arrange our schedules around a jog, a yoga class, or a trip to the gym. For many of us, caring for our bodies has become a routine part of our week. We understand that physical well-being deserves deliberate attention. But we weren’t always this aware.
In the early 1960s, intentional exercise occupied a very different place in American life. Yet the now-familiar expectation that adults would schedule regular workouts was much less established. In December 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy published “The Soft American” in Sports Illustrated, urging greater concern for physical fitness. As president, he made fitness a national priority, and the shift accelerated.
Over the following decades, health clubs and organized exercise became familiar features of daily life. Jim Fixx, Jane Fonda, Jack LaLanne, Richard Simmons, and Arnold Schwarzenegger inspired millions to get off the couch and start moving.
Gradually, we learned to pay attention to our bodies. We noticed the consequences of inactivity. We made room for movement. Communities and businesses created places to exercise, and friends encouraged one another to participate.
The change was cultural as well as personal. Taking time to care for the body became understandable, acceptable, and, for many, expected. It also became a multibillion-dollar business.
Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement discusses this cultural revolution and foresees a similar transformation. Its authors make a bold prediction: “Attentional wellness—the training and conditioning and maintenance of one’s diverse attentional capacities—will, in 2040, be understood as a basic good; simply pragmatic on the one hand (because one is more effective in the world when one’s attention is healthy and well), but also more than merely ‘useful’ since attentional wellness is also beautiful (it brings joy, and makes for richer lives, deeper intimacies, and a better world).”
The Friends of Attention, the collective behind this 2026 book, invite us to consider a cultural change: becoming conscious of where our attention goes and reclaiming a say in its direction. They urge us to make deliberate care for our attention as familiar as working out has become for our bodies.
Who is choosing what receives your attention?
Social media makes that question especially pressing. Its recommendations continually offer something else to watch, read, or react to. The Friends of Attention have a vivid name for this: “human fracking.” Just as drilling companies extract oil and gas from the earth, they argue, technology companies extract our attention and sell it. AI adds another layer: We can ask a system to select information, summarize an experience, or generate a response before we’ve considered what we think ourselves.
I remain enthusiastic about technology. A thoughtful exchange online, an illuminating article, or a useful AI conversation can deserve our attention. The point of the fracking metaphor is not that technology is bad, but that our attention is valuable—valuable enough that others are working hard to capture it. The question is whether we are choosing those encounters consciously and noticing how they are affecting us.
Dr. Jessica Kizorek, at Florida International University, shared, “My students are slowly beginning to recognize how easily AI can hijack their emotional and intellectual attention. In my class, we talk about the ‘rabbit hole’ as an experience that can be driven by their own curiosity or by AI sucking them in without their conscious attention.”
Just as early research on inactivity helped spark the fitness movement, new research suggests that unexamined attention carries costs, too. A 2025 survey of 319 knowledge workers by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon researchers found that greater confidence in generative AI was associated with less self-reported critical thinking in AI-assisted tasks.
A 2025 randomized study in PNAS Nexus found that blocking mobile internet on smartphones for just two weeks improved sustained attention, subjective well-being, and mental health. Our attention, it seems, responds quickly when our environment changes.
Begin by noticing
The manifesto leaves us with a question we can carry into everyday life: What am I giving my attention to, and how is it affecting me?
Attention Essential Reads
Try pausing at a few ordinary moments. Before opening an app, ask what you came to do. After using it, notice whether you did that. During a conversation, observe whether you are listening or preparing your reply. If you find yourself deep in a rabbit hole, borrow the question Dr. Kizorek gives her students: “Am I directing this exploration, or is AI directing me?” These pauses can reveal choices we otherwise miss.
Then consider what you would like to give more of your attention to. Perhaps it is your partner, a book, music, your neighborhood, or your own thoughts. Choose one and make room for it today.
There is no need to make every moment goal-oriented. Watching clouds, enjoying a silly conversation, or lingering over a painting can be deeply worthwhile. We can allow our attention to be playful, receptive, and unhurried.
A change we can make together
The fitness revolution thrived on collective action. A culture of attention needs that too. Families can agree to put phones aside during meals. Friends can take walks together. Schools can create space for sustained discussion, and workplaces can protect periods without an expectation of immediate replies.
Clinicians can invite reflection: Where does your attention go during a typical day? Where would you like it to go? What would make that easier?
In 1960, Kennedy worried that Americans were growing soft. Today the risk is a different kind of softness: attention that goes wherever it is pulled. We learned to build strength, endurance, and flexibility in our bodies. We can build them in our minds, too.
This manifesto caught my attention; I hope it catches yours.
The first exercise takes no equipment, and you can start it now: Pay attention to your attention.
