Our attention is the currency.

Many of the students I work with can't sit with themselves for ten minutes. Neither could I, for most of my twenties. And I don't mean being distracted by a phone — even without one, it's uncomfortable to be alone with your own mind. You talk to yourself constantly without actually thinking. You fill the space. You avoid being alone with a question that doesn't have an answer yet.

You can't fix that by taking the phone away. Remove the device and the reflex is still there: fill every gap, react to everything, never sit with uncertainty.

I've stopped thinking of it as a distraction problem. Distraction is the symptom. The thing underneath is what's being taken while we're distracted — and we have all been paying in, most of us since before we could read.

Attention is what gets spent minute to minute. Time is what gets spent across a life, and it is much harder to watch going.

You can lose an hour and feel it. You can lose a year and only notice from the far side, when somebody asks what you did with it and you don't have an answer ready.

That's the part I actually worry about. Not the phones — the fact that noticing where a day went is a learnable skill, and almost nobody is taught it. We assume everyone picks it up somewhere along the way. Plenty of us never do.

TWO

What it looks like in a classroom

Almost every student I work with has an attention deficit of some kind. Put any of us in a collective classroom and very little gets through — not because the material is too hard, and not because we don't want it.

A classroom is a competition for attention, and we walk in already outmatched: a phone, a feed, and a reflex trained since childhood to jump at whatever moves next.

What decides it is the educator. A skilled one captures attention and holds it — breaks through the noise, makes the thing in front of you briefly more interesting than everything else on offer. When that happens, people learn. When it doesn't, we sit in the room and nothing lands.

That is an enormous thing to ask of one person, every hour of every day. And we rarely name it as the skill it is. We talk as though the attention were free, and the teaching were the hard part.

THREE

The part I had to own

I struggled with most of what I've described — the attention, the time, the inability to sit still with a hard question. For years I could point at the reasons, and the reasons were real. The system I went through wasn't built for how I worked either.

But that only carried me so far. At some point the honest version was that the system had failed me, and I had also failed at parts of it myself — and only one of those was ever going to be mine to fix. Blaming the structure was accurate and it changed nothing. Picking up the part that was mine is what actually moved.

I don't say that to hand the problem back to people who are already carrying it. Both things stay true at once: the structure really is built wrong, and nobody else can do your reps for you. That's not a comfortable place to land, but it's the only one I've found that goes anywhere.

FOUR

What it takes to keep up

People used to keep records of themselves. A journal, a diary, a notebook. You'd sit down and think about your day. What happened? What did it mean? What would you do differently? That was just an ordinary thing people did.

Mostly we've stopped. Instead of journaling, people post. But posting isn't reflection — a post is a performance. You're performing for an audience, and what comes back isn't feedback. A like tells you a stranger's thumb moved. It doesn't tell you whether you handled a hard moment well, or whether you kept a promise to yourself.

It's riskier now, too. Say something that's actually yours and you're not joining a conversation, you're taking a risk. People get piled on. So most of us work that out fast and stop — stop participating, stop thinking out loud, find a side that already sounds right and let it do the thinking for us.

I include myself in that. And the students I work with have even less to go on — they grew up watching people be punished for thinking out loud, so sitting down and working out what you actually think feels dangerous rather than ordinary.

Which matters most exactly where things were already hardest. Executive function is just the machinery for running your own life: holding a goal, breaking it into steps, doing the hard thing instead of the easy one, noticing you've drifted and adjusting. For people with intellectual disabilities those processes are harder to develop — the research is clear on that, and much less clear on how to build them. The literature describes treatment in this population as under-researched, which means what gets done is mostly invented locally, by practitioners, in whatever time they can find.

What I keep landing on is that the tools are unglamorous and old. Reflection. Keeping your own schedule. Being accountable to something you said you'd do. Those are the habits underneath any education worth the name — not the content, the habits.

A plan someone helped build is something they can act on, argue with, fail against and revise. A plan handed to them is just a document about them.

FIVE

Where this leaves education

And the content — the part we've always organized school around — is exactly the part that just got cheap.

We can outsource thinking now. That's real, that's here. AI can do an enormous amount of what used to be the entire point of an education: recall it, arrange it, summarize it, produce it on demand.

Which puts the classroom problem in a different light. The scarce thing was never the information — it was the person who could hold a room. That was true before any of this, and we just didn't have to say it out loud, because the information was scarce too and it hid the real work.

What's left is knowing how to learn. And more than that — actually wanting to.

That's harder to teach, and it isn't distributed evenly. Wanting to learn needs drive, drive needs passion for something specific, and passion is hard to reach when what you want sits outside what you can currently do. Which isn't a limit on anyone. It's that watching is most of what any of us has practiced. You can't develop a passion for something you've only ever been an audience for. Passion comes from making something badly, then making it slightly less badly, and noticing the difference. That loop is the whole thing — and plenty of us were never handed a reason to run it.

So I've stopped thinking of the job as teaching people. I'm trying to get people to want to teach themselves. In a world where the answers are free, that want is the only part that still belongs to them.

SIX

What we're building — and what not to build

That's what Tervik came out of. It isn't a replacement for the official system — life plans, the six-month reviews, the compliance work all still happen. But those run on a cycle measured in months, and a day moves faster than that. By the time a review comes round, what's left is whatever people can still recall, and what survives that long isn't what mattered most. It's whatever was loudest.

So we built the small loop. Students set their own schedule and can see what counts toward their credential. They reflect daily, briefly, at their own pace. Mentors respond, and students respond back. A student takes a risk on Monday and looks at it on Monday, with someone next to them asking what happened and what they'd do differently.

The software doesn't do the thinking. It protects the space where the thinking can happen — and it keeps the record, so that when the six-month review does come, it's built on what was written down as it happened, by both sides, rather than on what anyone can still remember.

But there's a trap in building anything for vulnerable people, and it's worth naming. I understand why these systems are protective — people got hurt when they weren't, and every delay was put there by someone trying to protect someone else. The trouble is that the instinct doesn't come from nowhere. If fear is what's being sold to all of us, fear is also what we'll design from, unless we're deliberate about not doing it. A system built out of fear comes out restrictive by default, and it looks responsible the whole time.

And restriction has a cost we don't talk about. When someone never feels a consequence, they never get the information a consequence carries. When someone is never trusted with a real risk, they never find out what they're capable of. Small failures, close together, with good questions afterwards — that isn't a lower standard. It's the only thing that has ever built a skill in anyone.

SEVEN

The future is what we make it

Mistakes happen. Things go wrong. And then people persevere and learn from it — which is the most reliably true thing about us, and the thing the feed never reports.

None of us are short on potential. We're short on repetitions. Short on time to think about our own lives. And short on chances to feel like our choices actually matter.

We can't quiet the noise. But we can hand back some of what's being spent — and build one place where a day is yours to look at, think about, and decide something from.

If we put that attention into making something better, that's what gets built — and the world adapts around it, the way it always has. That isn't optimism as a mood. It's the whole argument, really: attention is the currency, and we still get to choose what we buy with it.