Herbert Simon, an economist who later won a Nobel prize for studying how people decide, said this in a 1971 talk, decades before the smartphone. It sounds like a complaint about noise. It is a price tag.

Simon's verb is consumes. Information is not something you collect for free and keep. Every article, thread and forwarded voice note is paid for in the one thing you cannot print more of.

So reading is spending.

Count yesterday's bill. Two newsletters before breakfast, a podcast on the MRT, six tabs open on a competitor's pricing page, a group chat arguing over a headline. Each one felt like getting smarter.

Together they took the two clear hours you had. By 4pm you knew a lot and had decided nothing.

That is the trap in the line. You can be well informed and broke in the same afternoon, because the feed never runs out and your attention does. More is always on offer, and you are always the smaller number.

Simon's next clause names the fix: allocate it. Decide what the attention is for first, then let in the information that question needs and nothing else.

So today: before you open anything, write down the one decision you owe this week. Read what helps you make it, and close the rest unread. You will know less by tonight, and you will have decided.