You sit down for five minutes.

You open one app.

A video ends and another begins.

Someone is angry about something you did not know existed.

A stranger has reorganised a kitchen.

There is a war.

A skincare routine.

A political argument.

A dog falls into a swimming pool.

Someone you went to school with is standing beside the ocean.

Twenty seven minutes have passed.

We often describe this experience as wasted time.

That description may be too shallow.

Time passed, certainly.

But something else was being continuously directed.

Attention.

Attention determines what enters consciousness long enough to become significant.

What we repeatedly notice can influence what feels normal, desirable, threatening, urgent or absent from our lives.

This is one reason the conversation about digital wellbeing deserves more sophistication than simply declaring screens good or bad.

In a May 2025 policy brief, the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe described the evidence linking technology and young people’s wellbeing as mixed. Digital environments can create benefits and harms, sometimes simultaneously, while vulnerable young people can experience disproportionate negative effects. The WHO therefore recommends policy responses involving governments and industry, not simply better individual self control.

Earlier WHO data from almost 280,000 adolescents across 44 countries and regions found that 11 percent showed signs of problematic social media behaviour in 2022, up from 7 percent in 2018. At the same time, heavy but nonproblematic users reported stronger peer support and social connections, another reminder that digital life cannot be reduced to a simple villain.

The more interesting question is what happens when environments designed to compete for attention become environments in which identity is formed.

A teenager does not merely see thousands of images.

They repeatedly encounter signals about which bodies receive admiration, which lifestyles look successful, which opinions generate reaction, which possessions indicate status and which versions of a person appear worthy of attention.

Adults do too.

We may believe we are merely scrolling through culture.

Culture is also scrolling through us.

None of this means people are helpless.

We close applications.

We reject trends.

We reinterpret what we see.

We find communities online that might have been impossible to find locally.

Digital spaces can give language and connection to people who once believed they were alone.

But agency becomes harder to exercise when we misunderstand the resource being contested.

The scarce resource is not merely screen time.

It is the ability to decide what deserves sustained presence in your mind.

That makes attention part of Identity Sovereignty.

There are questions worth asking before the next automatic scroll.

Who chose what appeared here?

Why did this hold me?

What disappeared while I was looking?

And perhaps the most revealing one:

If nobody were measuring my reaction, would I still give this my attention?