We are living in an era where attention, not information, is the scarce resource. And what we pay attention to (not what we claim to value) reveals the architecture of our priorities.

Consider a few comparisons that, though deliberately absurd, tell a deeper truth. We now have more Marvel movies than major classes of antibiotics. The world produces more aspiring pop singers than there are widely used chemotherapy regimens. Strangely enough, there are fewer specialist doctors across all of Scandinavia than there are “working actors” navigating Hollywood. It’s the kind of statistic that makes you pause, then wonder how, exactly, we got here.

These are curiosities, but they are not trivial. They expose the way our public and economic systems, shaped by the attention economy, reward spectacle over substance. On TikTok, creators can generate more content in a week than global scientists develop life-saving vaccines in a year. Reality television franchises produce more episodes than some countries have hospital beds. And if pressed to list 50 essential medicines, most people would struggle, though they could list 50 fictional characters without hesitation.

This isn’t because we are frivolous. It’s because our information ecosystem is designed to make the essential nearly invisible.

Public health, for instance, succeeds most when nothing dramatic happens. But our media environment prizes drama. A celebrity feud receives wall-to-wall coverage; a breakthrough in antibiotic development might not receive any at all. We’re left with the illusion that entertainment is abundant and science is peripheral, when the opposite is true.

This misalignment doesn’t just distort perception; it shapes policy. When attention becomes the proxy for importance, fields that operate quietly (research hospitals, public health units, epidemiology labs) get sidelined in budgets and political debates. Their work is slow, cumulative, and foundational. It lacks the emotional peaks that algorithms are tuned to amplify.

We saw this play out during the pandemic. For a brief moment, the public recognized the indispensability of nurses, virologists, and ICU physicians. They were interviewed, applauded, essential. Yet as the acute phase receded, many returned to the shadows of public consciousness, even as they continued to work through exhaustion, burnout, and chronic understaffing. Misinformation spread faster than credible scientific updates. The systems that kept us alive were allowed to fray.

Attention is not neutral. It is a form of power. When we lavish it on the trivial and starve the necessary, the consequences are real.

Our cultural fixation on fictional heroism is a revealing example. Superhero films, produced with astonishing regularity, give us the thrill of salvation without requiring much of us. Real-world health systems, by contrast, demand long-term investment, political will, and steady public engagement. One offers escape. The other offers survival. And yet, we treat the latter as optional.

This is not an argument against entertainment, which brings joy, connection, and sometimes insight. It is a reminder that its omnipresence is not inevitable: It is engineered. Platforms and industries optimized for engagement naturally elevate the spectacular. Meanwhile, the systems that make our lives possible (vaccination, antibiotic stewardship, emergency preparedness) operate on timescales and incentives that don’t map easily onto virality.

If we want a society that is not merely entertained but resilient, we need to rebalance our attention. That means demanding transparency and investment in public health, supporting long-term scientific research, and building media structures that don’t reward only the urgent and the outrageous.

It also means widening the circle of people we call “heroes.” Not just the ones in capes or on red carpets, but the ones in scrubs, in labs, in understaffed clinics: the ones whose work has no premiere date, no box office record, no awards season.

Entertainment will always occupy a comfortable place in our culture. But it must not be allowed to overshadow the foundations on which our future depends.

In a world with more Marvel films than new antibiotics, it’s worth remembering: Fiction may fuel our fantasies, but only science and medicine will secure our survival.

Paul Dranichnikov is a physician in Sweden.