Attention Is Cheap. Enduring Work Is Rare.

For years, creators have been told to think bigger in terms of reach, platform, visibility; every other metric. The assumption lurking behind that advice sounds logical. Relevance scales upward. If your work matters, it should eventually escape the gravity well of obscurity and enter the mainstream.

But that assumption no longer holds.

Chasing visibility now is less like climbing a ladder and more like predicting the weather. Attention gathers unpredictably, disperses without warning, and rarely corresponds to effort. So planning a creative career around mass recognition today resembles building a house on sand while insisting the tide will cooperate.

Many creators sense the growing mismatch between labor and reward, but they hesitate to name it. After all, doing so would mean abandoning the comforting belief that success is merely delayed rather than structurally constrained.

Their mistake is assuming the problem is talent scarcity, when the real culprit is attention dilution.

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