Where Our Attention Goes When Life Gets Loud

The table is a virtual one, but it feels real enough. France, Brazil, South Korea, London, South Africa—five locations, five time zones, one shared question: where does our attention actually go, and how do we get it back?

Janita—known affectionately as Fruitloop, a name that already tells you this won’t be a stiff conversation—opens with the weather. In her South African city, summer, winter, and rain sometimes all show up before lunch. Thirty degrees in the morning, fifteen by afternoon. It’s a small detail, but it sets the tone. Attention, like the weather, is changeable. You think you’re settled, and suddenly everything shifts.

“Attention is the purest form of presence,” she says. “It’s where our energy, care, and consciousness meet.” Distraction, on the other hand, isn’t just noise. It’s hunger. It’s barking dogs. It’s your body being uncomfortable. It’s life tapping you on the shoulder when you’re trying to look straight ahead.

From London, Bruce nods—metaphorically at least. His main adversary is the house next door, currently being renovated with enthusiasm and power tools. Regular noise, he can adapt to. Sudden sounds are the problem. The jolt. The mental derailment. He’d rather do something useful than spend precious energy fighting distractions. There’s a quiet wisdom in that—choosing progress over perfection.

In South Korea, Nathalie prefers silence so complete it almost hums. For writing or reading, she needs to be alone, no movement in her peripheral vision, no interruptions. She admits a slight worry about artificial intelligence: yes, it’s fast, helpful, impressive—but what happens to deep research when answers arrive instantly? What happens to the slow burn of concentration?

Frank—the Mayor, calling in from France—has a different relationship with AI. He’s running on what he calls “15 engines at once,” a month so intense that without AI, he says plainly, it would have been physically and mentally impossible. Planning, assessing, structuring—AI has become essential. But he doesn’t trust it blindly. The real danger, he says, is the echo chamber: systems that tell you what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear. “You have to constantly revise your prompts,” he explains, “reconfigure the system, challenge it. Otherwise, you’re just talking to yourself with better grammar.”

Rosii, joining from Brazil, brings the conversation back to something more intimate: procrastination. The irritation of knowing what you should do—and not doing it. “If you don’t change your actions, the year stays the same,” she says, with the quiet determination of someone who means it. When tasks remain undone, she feels sad, even angry with herself. When she finishes them, the relief is almost physical. Presence, for her, is deeply emotional.

Boundaries, it turns out, are where theory meets resistance. Frank works from home, which sounds idyllic until you realise that people don’t always respect invisible walls. His solution? Work at 3:00 or 3:30 in the morning, when the world is asleep and expectations are mercifully low. Sometimes, he admits, he has to be unpleasant to protect his focus. It helps that his four cats only require feeding, not conversation.

Bruce mentions how something as unromantic as reliable hardware changed his working life. A computer that doesn’t crash is, in its own way, a guardian of attention. He also sees AI reshaping conferences—not because of the technology itself, but because of the questions we learn to ask. Creativity, it seems, is still a human responsibility.

The group starts to play. If attention were an animal, what would it be? Bruce chooses a bee: focused, but capable of handling interruptions. Rosii imagines a beta fish—calm, contained, quietly mesmerizing. Frank feels like a nervous mouse, sprinting away from a tsunami of tasks that keeps reshaping his day. Nathalie thinks of birds landing with precision, and predators—lions, jaguars—waiting in silence for the exact right moment. Janita offers a sloth, a gentle jab at bureaucracy’s “slowocracy,” followed by an owl, alert in ways we often underestimate.

Even distraction gets its own metaphors. Snacks, specifically. Marmite for Bruce—best consumed absentmindedly. Popcorn for Nathalie, noisy by design. Pastries for Rosii, appearing every Wednesday at work and derailing productivity with sugar and conversation. Frank admits that food in general is his weakness—beautifully packaged treats are almost impossible to resist. Janita confesses to ice pops, complicated by a son who chews the ice loudly and leaves sticky wrappers everywhere. Presence, it turns out, is often tested in the kitchen.

Somewhere between laughter and reflection, a shared understanding settles in. Attention isn’t something we find. It’s something we choose. Rosii protects hers by keeping her phone far away while studying. Frank reframes distraction as a mild form of procrastination—a way to avoid uncomfortable truths. Nathalie reminds everyone that attention lives inside her; she decides when to use it.

As the meeting winds down, Frank mentions he’s prepared the topics for February and will send a WhatsApp message. “It will take five seconds,” he says lightly. “Please don’t be distracted by it.”

Everyone laughs. And perhaps that’s the point. Reclaiming attention doesn’t mean eliminating life’s noise. It means noticing where your energy goes, pausing before reacting, and gently choosing again. Not perfectly. Just consciously.