I counted my notifications last Tuesday. Not the ones I checked -- the ones I received. Between 7am and 10pm, my phone buzzed, dinged, or lit up 247 times. Two hundred and forty-seven interruptions in fifteen hours. That's one every 3.6 minutes. And I'm someone who considers himself relatively disciplined about these things.
We've built an entire economy around the notification. And like most economies, it serves the people who run it, not the people who live in it.
The attention arms race
Every app on your phone is competing for the same finite resource: your attention. And the notification is the weapon of choice. Not because it's effective -- most notifications go unread or dismissed -- but because the cost of sending one is zero and the potential return is enormous. One tap. One open. One session. One more minute of engagement to report to investors.
The result is an arms race where every app behaves as though its notification is the most important thing in your life. Duolingo guilts you about your streak. LinkedIn tells you someone you vaguely know has a work anniversary. Instagram informs you that someone you haven't spoken to in three years just posted for the first time in a while. Your banking app celebrates you spending money. A food delivery app reminds you that you're hungry, as if you might have forgotten.
Each notification individually seems harmless. Dismiss it in half a second and carry on. But the cumulative effect is devastating. It's not the interruption that costs you. It's the fractured attention. The constant, low-level awareness that something might need your attention right now. The inability to be fully present in anything because your pocket is always vibrating with something that isn't.
The design problem nobody admits
Here's what frustrates me as someone who spent years thinking about how brands communicate with people: notification fatigue is treated as a user problem. The solution, according to most tech companies, is for you to manage your settings. Go into each app. Navigate the labyrinth of notification preferences. Toggle off the ones you don't want. Repeat for sixty-seven apps. And then do it again when the next update resets your preferences or adds new notification types you didn't ask for.
This is not a user problem. This is a design problem. More specifically, it's an incentive problem. The people designing these systems are measured on engagement metrics that go up when notifications are sent and go down when they're not. The entire architecture is built to interrupt you. Asking users to opt out of interruptions is like asking someone to bail water while you keep drilling holes in the boat.
The apps that get this right are rare and revealing. Apple's Screen Time reports come once a week, at a time you're likely to review them. Signal only notifies you when someone actually messages you. Monzo tells you when money moves, which is something you genuinely need to know. These apps treat your attention as something valuable. Most apps treat it as something to be extracted.
Silence as a luxury product
There's a growing market signal that silence is becoming premium. The wellness industry has turned "digital detox" into a product category. Retreats charge thousands for the privilege of not being interrupted. Focus apps that block other apps -- apps to protect you from apps -- are a booming category. The irony would be funny if it weren't so depressing.
But I think there's a bigger opportunity here than the wellness industry has spotted. The brands and products that will define the next decade aren't the ones that shout loudest. They're the ones that respect the quiet.
Think about the products you love most. The ones that feel thoughtful. Chances are they're the ones that don't bother you unnecessarily. The tool that works when you need it and disappears when you don't. The service that communicates important things and stays silent about everything else. There's a reason people pay premium prices for Leica cameras and Muji stationery and good noise-cancelling headphones. These products understand that the absence of noise is a feature, not a bug.
What I'm building differently
I think about this constantly with my own projects. When I built CultureTerminal, the whole premise was: here's what's happening in culture, presented once, clearly, without yelling at you about it. No push notifications. No "you missed this!" guilt trips. No badges screaming for attention. Just a clean feed that's there when you want it and silent when you don't.
Same with Trove. A taste engine should help you understand yourself. It should not be pinging you constantly about things to save, things to review, things to categorise. The value is in the depth of what's already there, not in the urgency of what's new.
I learned this in advertising, actually. The best campaigns weren't the loudest. They were the ones that appeared in the right place, at the right time, with the right message. The rest was silence. Media planning used to be about precision -- reaching people when they were receptive, not carpet-bombing them until they surrendered. Somewhere along the way, digital advertising forgot that lesson and notifications followed the same path.
The permission model
What would a truly respectful notification system look like? I keep imagining an app that asks you, during setup: "How much do you want to hear from us?" And the options aren't buried in settings -- they're the first thing you decide. Weekly digest. Important only. Never. And "never" is a valid, respected, prominently displayed choice.
It would mean some metrics go down. Session frequency. Daily active users. The numbers that venture capitalists love and that have absolutely nothing to do with whether someone values your product. But the metrics that matter -- retention, recommendation, trust -- would go up. Because the people who stay would stay because they wanted to, not because they were nagged into it.
The notification economy runs on the assumption that attention grabbed is attention earned. It's not. Attention grabbed is attention stolen. And people are starting to notice the theft.
The brands that figure this out first -- the ones that build silence into their product as a feature, that treat your attention as borrowed rather than owned -- will earn something that no amount of push notifications can manufacture.
Loyalty.
