In our anxious age, increasing attention is being directed to our attention, and to the extraordinary and seemingly inescapable forces trying to exploit it. In one recent survey, 75 percent of respondents said they have some kind of attention problem. The psychologist Gloria Mark has documented a precipitous slide over the past two decades in our ability to stay on task in various screen-based activities, findings that buttress what has become a widespread complaint. There must be a thousand and one articles asserting that the human attention span has dipped below that of the small, orange carp known as the goldfish, which for some reason has come to serve as the interspecies benchmark of distractibility. Goldfish themselves seem to be doing fine, but here on dry land, about 11 percent of American children have been diagnosed with A.D.H.D.

The implications are vast and troubling: Kids can’t read, students can’t think and rates of mental illness are spiking. By some accounts, this phenomenon is endangering democracy itself.

We definitely have an attention problem, but it’s not just a function of the digital technology that pings and beeps and flashes and nudges us ever closer to despair. It starts with the way we think about attention in the first place. An industry estimated to be worth $7 trillion views attention in the narrowest possible way: as something that can be measured in terms of device-engaged, task-oriented productivity, then optimized and operationalized and profitably controlled. That narrow view of attention has become so dominant that it even pervades efforts at resistance, including the countless well-meaning calls to “improve focus” or “avoid distraction.” In our efforts to liberate ourselves, we have become anxious accountants of our own attention.

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