While everyone’s optimizing for the scroll-stop or the click, we’re designing for the mental wrestling match that happens after. The kind of thing that surfaces later in the shower, mid-conversation, or at 3am.
Most are fighting for attention—the battle to be won. We are working to create pause points in consciousness, for contemplation, a mental workout, akin to winning the war. The interesting tension is that contemplation requires initial attention to seed it—but it’s a fundamentally different kind of attention. Not the dopamine spike, but the slower burn of “wait, what?” followed by genuine puzzlement.
The Bible and Enlightenment thinkers did this VERY VERY well. A key reason for their longevity. The Bible’s parables, for example, work precisely because they’re maddeningly indirect. “The kingdom of heaven is like…” forces interpretation, not consumption. Our duty is for people to experience something that compels them to think or rethink their understanding of things.
Zig when others zag equates to pulling in for contemplation and connecting in conversation. The metric is not solely engagement but cognitive residue—success ultimately measured by how much of what we create refuses to be forgotten or easily dismissed. Attention is finite, and transactional, eventually it releases. Contemplation is generative, constantly revealing, inviting your return through cognitive prompting.