Attention Economy, Sociological Imagination, and Mental Health: Building an Architecture of Agency

What if your anxiety isn't a personal failure—but a designed outcome?

You're not weak for feeling overwhelmed by your phone. You're not broken for doom-scrolling at 2 am. You're not alone in the exhausting cycle of comparison, FOMO, and digital depletion.

You're responding exactly as platforms designed you to.

This article flips the script on how we talk about technology and mental health. Instead of more self-help tips that put the burden back on you, it uses sociology's most powerful tool—the sociological imagination—to reveal something liberating: the attention economy isn't destiny. It's a system. And systems can be changed.

Inside, you'll discover:

→ Why your struggles with social media are patterned responses to profit-driven design—not character flaws

→ How concepts like anomie, social reproduction, and structure/agency can actually protect your mental health

→ Concrete pathways for action—from personal digital habits to institutional policies to social movements

→ Reflective questions that transform private distress into shared problem-solving

This isn't a critique for critique's sake. It's a blueprint for building what the author calls an "architecture of agency"—where attention is treated as a shared public resource rather than just a commodity to be harvested.

Stop blaming yourself. Start understanding the system. Then help change it.

📥 Download the full article now.