I Didn’t Start a Business to Miss My Life

I sat down last week to create an Instagram account for Wonderment.

Within minutes, something in me resisted.

Not fear. Not laziness. Not even confusion about what to post. Just a quiet, physical reluctance — the sense that this platform was about to ask for a kind of attention I didn’t want to give it.

So I closed the laptop.

And the thought that followed me out of the room was simple:

I didn’t start a business to spend my life inside social media.

Most people don’t.

Ask someone why they started working for themselves and they’ll usually tell you about freedom. Time. Being able to do the school run. Making something of their own. Having control over a Tuesday afternoon. Building a life that feels more like theirs.

Very few people begin with a dream of checking engagement statistics before breakfast.

And yet, somewhere between starting the thing and trying to make it succeed, it’s remarkably easy to end up trading away the exact things we were trying to gain.

Notifications.

Algorithms.

Content calendars.

Reels.

Emails.

Analytics.

Optimisation.

A quick check that becomes twenty minutes. A photograph taken because it might make content. A lovely moment interrupted by the tiny thought that perhaps it should be posted.

Slowly, the business we built to give us more life can begin asking for all of it back.

This isn’t an argument against Instagram. Or social media. Or ambition.

Plenty of people genuinely enjoy those things and have built brilliant businesses through them.

It’s a much more personal question:

What if the way I’m growing my business is incompatible with the reason I wanted one in the first place?

Attention is not infinite

In 1971, economist Herbert Simon wrote about the strange consequence of living in a world rich with information: information consumes attention.

And attention is limited.

More than fifty years later, that feels less like an economic observation and more like a description of an ordinary Tuesday.

Messages. Tabs. Emails. Notifications. Searches. Posts. Things to remember. Things to reply to. Things we opened and forgot why we opened.

Researcher Sophie Leroy coined the term attention residue for what happens when we switch from one task to another while part of our mind is still caught in the thing we just left.

We move on.

Our attention doesn’t always come with us.

Cal Newport has written extensively about the opposite state: deep, uninterrupted work. The kind where you stay with one thing long enough to actually think.

The problem isn’t that checking Instagram takes three minutes.

It’s that life built from hundreds of three-minute interruptions begins to feel strangely fragmented.

You can spend an entire day doing things and reach the evening feeling as though you were never fully anywhere.

And I know what that looks like for me.

It is sitting beside my children while part of my mind is somewhere inside a screen.

It is noticing beautiful evening light and wondering, before I’ve even enjoyed it, whether I should photograph it.

It is going outside and finding myself mentally writing a caption instead of simply being outside.

There is a particular irony in building a publication about noticing ordinary life while becoming too distracted to notice my own.

Does the business have to grow the fastest?

There is a peculiar language surrounding business.

Scale.

Reach.

Growth.

More.

The assumption is almost always that bigger is better and faster is best.

But growth is a strange word because we’ve allowed business to monopolise its meaning.

A life can grow too.

So can a relationship.

So can your health.

Your curiosity.

Your capacity to be present.

Your children’s memories of you.

The amount of yourself you still have left at six o’clock.

Oliver Burkeman writes about the startling brevity of a human life by reducing it to roughly four thousand weeks.

Four thousand.

Not an infinite supply of Mondays.

Not endless summers.

Not countless ordinary evenings.

A finite number.

And once you begin thinking about time that way, productivity starts to look slightly different.

Every yes contains a no.

An hour spent feeding one thing is an hour that cannot feed something else.

Which means a business demanding constant attention is making decisions about your life whether you realise it or not.

Two ways to build

I keep imagining two businesses.

One needs feeding every day.

It wakes up hungry.

Post something.

Respond.

Stay visible.

Keep up.

React to whatever changed this week.

Nothing you did yesterday seems to count for very long.

Then there is another kind.

An essay.

A book.

A useful resource.

A beautiful object.

A newsletter somebody genuinely wants to receive.

Something made carefully once that can continue travelling without requiring its creator to stand beside it shouting.

The second kind might grow more slowly.

But I think I am increasingly interested in slow things.

Things with roots.

Things that accumulate rather than constantly disappear.

Things that leave the person making them enough space to remain a person.

Neither model is morally superior.

But they ask for very different lives.

And I’m beginning to think we should choose the life first.

Then build the business that fits inside it.

A different scorecard

Maybe revenue isn’t the only KPI worth tracking.

Perhaps there is another scorecard.

One that would look ridiculous in a quarterly report.

Did I read the bedtime story all the way through?

Was I patient with the people I love?

Did I notice when the evenings began drawing in?

Did I cook something properly instead of eating beside my laptop?

Did I go outside?

Did I have conversations that weren’t interrupted by checking something?

Could I sit beside a fire without once wondering how it would look online?

Those things won’t appear in analytics.

But I’m increasingly suspicious that they might be the numbers that matter.

Because the hidden cost of endless productivity isn’t always exhaustion.

Sometimes it’s absence.

You were there.

But your attention wasn’t.

Nothing meaningful grows overnight

Trees don’t rush.

Neither do gardens, trust, friendships, children or the slow accumulation of a reputation worth having.

We don’t stand beside an oak tree shouting at it to increase its reach by thirty percent before the end of the quarter.

We let it take the time it takes.

Perhaps businesses are allowed to do that too.

I still don’t have an Instagram account for Wonderment.

I may make one.

Probably, eventually, I will.

But I don’t want to build a publication about noticing ordinary life by becoming too busy promoting it to notice my own.

Perhaps the best business isn’t the one that grows the fastest.

Perhaps it’s the one that leaves enough of you for the rest of your life.

Research cited

This piece draws on a small body of work around attention, time and the way modern work fragments our focus.

Herbert A. Simon’s 1971 essay Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World introduced the idea that an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention.

Sophie Leroy’s research on attention residue explored what happens when we move from one unfinished task to another and part of our attention remains stuck on what we have just left.

Cal Newport’s book Deep Work examines the value of sustained, distraction-free concentration in a working culture increasingly built around interruption.

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals reflects on the finite nature of a human life and the impossibility of fitting everything into it.

Sources

• Simon, Herbert A. (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.
• Leroy, Sophie (2009). Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work? The Challenge of Attention Residue When Switching Between Work Tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
• Newport, Cal (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
• Burkeman, Oliver (2021). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.