What My Business Is Asking Of Me

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

Within minutes, something in me resisted. Not fear, exactly. Not laziness, and not uncertainty about what to post. Just a quiet, physical reluctance — the sense that, before I'd even shared a single photograph, I was about to hand over a part of my attention I wasn't sure I wanted to lose.

I closed the laptop.

The dogs were asleep in patches of afternoon sun. Somewhere upstairs, my daughters were arguing over something that would almost certainly be forgotten by bedtime. My coffee had gone cold beside me. The washing still needed bringing in. Nothing remarkable. Just the ordinary things that quietly become a life.

And I found myself wondering something that's stayed with me since: if this business became everything I hoped it could become, would afternoons like this one become more common — or rarer?

When people talk about starting a business, they usually talk about freedom. The freedom to choose your own hours. To collect your children from school. To spend a Tuesday exactly where you want to be. Nobody starts out dreaming of studying algorithms in the evening, or wondering whether a Reel would have outperformed a photograph. And yet somewhere between the dream and the reality, a lot of us quietly trade one for the other. The business we built to give us more life starts asking, gradually, for all of it back.

This isn't really an article about Instagram. Instagram just happened to be the question sitting on my laptop last week. If it disappeared tomorrow, I'd probably just replace it with something else — SEO, email marketing, the next platform, the next thing I convince myself I need to master before I'm finally allowed to relax. The platform was never really the problem. It's the quiet belief underneath it: that after just one more thing, life can begin.

I went looking for whether anyone had actually studied this feeling, and it turns out plenty of people have. Back in 1971, the economist Herbert Simon pointed out that in a world overflowing with information, the truly scarce resource isn't information at all — it's attention. Every notification draws from the same limited reserve. Roy Baumeister's research on decision fatigue suggests something similar: even small, seemingly insignificant choices wear down our mental energy over the course of a day, so that by evening our thinking is noisier and less clear than it was that morning. There's also a term — attention residue, coined by researcher Sophie Leroy — for what happens when we move from one task to the next before mentally finishing the first. Part of our attention stays behind, and we carry the fragments into whatever comes next. Cal Newport makes a related point in his writing on deep work: a day spent switching constantly between emails, messages, and small tasks can feel enormously productive while producing almost nothing that actually feels meaningful.

None of it is really about technology. It's about what happens to a mind that's asked to change direction fifty times before lunch.

I keep thinking there are two very different ways to build something. One depends on constant attention — daily content, daily engagement, always reacting, always keeping up. It grows through continual presence. The other grows differently: a thoughtful essay, a well-made product, a book, a newsletter someone genuinely wants to open. Something made with care that keeps working long after the day it was made. Neither way is wrong. But one spends attention continuously, and the other slowly compounds it, and I don't think I'd noticed until this week which one I actually wanted to be building.

Nothing that matters seems to grow quickly. Trees don't rush. Neither do gardens, or trust, or friendships, or children. We accept that everywhere else in life without question. I'm not sure why I'd assumed a business should be any different.

I still don't have an Instagram account for Wonderment. I might, one day. I might not. That's not really the question anymore. The real one is whether I'm building something that expands my life, or something that quietly replaces it — because I didn't start this to become endlessly available to strangers while slowly becoming unavailable to the people upstairs, still arguing about whatever it was, probably already forgetting why.

The coffee's still cold. The washing's still out. I haven't brought it in yet.