Medicine has developed a new mental health illness of the “attention economy.” The term was introduced by psychologist and Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, who argued that an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention, making human attention an increasingly valuable resource. Physicians always depended on attention to the patient, trainee, colleagues, and the required attention to quiet work of becoming wiser. Yet professional life increasingly unfolds within an attention economy that rewards being seen, celebrated, and continuously visible. Social media can amplify scholarship and connection, but it can also subtly redefine professional success as performance. Perhaps medicine now needs a different digital-ethical calibration to overcome this illness, one grounded in three choices: wisdom over visibility, contribution over performance, and presence over publicity.
Wisdom over visibility
Medicine has traditionally granted authority not simply for being seen, but for developing judgment worthy of being heard. Yet digital professional culture increasingly rewards visibility: frequent posts, conference photographs, self-announcements, institutional celebrations, and rapid commentary on every emerging issue. A physician may leave grand rounds and immediately post a photograph announcing attendance, while the colleague who spends another hour discussing a difficult societal issue or diagnostic uncertainty with peers or trainees remains invisible. The distinction is not between social media and scholarship. Social media can disseminate valuable knowledge. The distinction is between visibility as a means and visibility as an end.
The same principle should govern our digital lives. Before posting, physicians might ask: Am I illuminating something, or merely announcing myself? Professional stature should accumulate judgment, generosity, scholarship, mentorship, and service, not simply digital frequency. Visibility can amplify wisdom, but it cannot substitute for it.
Contribution over performance
Professional life increasingly contains opportunities for performance: matriculation, second-look day, Match Day, white-coat ceremonies, conference selfies, promotion announcements, awards, panels, podcasts, and posts celebrating publications or even attending conferences. These rituals can build community and recognize accomplishment. The problem begins when documenting professional activity becomes more important than the activity and learning itself.
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Consider two faculty members attending a national medical education meeting. One carefully documents every panel, reception, and encounter for social media. Another returns home with three ideas that change how residents receive feedback, shares new resources with colleagues, mentors a junior educator met at the meeting, and develops a collaborative research project. Both attended the same conference; their professional contributions may be quite different.
Medicine provides an even sharper example at the bedside. A physician who quietly calls a patient’s daughter after rounds, advocates with an insurer for a needed medication, helps a struggling resident reason through an error, or stays ten additional minutes with a frightened patient may generate no measurable digital footprint. Yet these acts represent the profession at its best.
LinkedIn and other platforms should therefore become places where professionals contribute ideas rather than continually curate identities. Share the lesson from the conference, not merely evidence that you attended it. Explain what the publication changes, not simply that it was published. The relevant question becomes: What did I contribute, not how successfully did I perform being a professional?
Presence over publicity
Perhaps the greatest cost of an attention economy is not vanity but fragmented presence or lack of mindfulness. Clinical medicine depends upon attention. A patient revealing depression, domestic violence, medication nonadherence, financial hardship, or fear of dying may offer the crucial information indirectly: in a pause, hesitation, expression, or unfinished sentence. Recognizing these signals requires something that no smartphone notification, EMR with agentic AI, or social media platform can provide: undivided human presence. Imagine a resident presenting a complicated patient while the attending physician intermittently checks messages on rounds. The attending may hear every laboratory value yet miss the resident’s uncertainty and ambiguity in his tone and nonverbal communication. Similarly, during a family meeting, a clinician thinking about the next email, post, photograph, or meeting may be physically present but professionally absent or not being mindful.
The same phenomenon occurs in education. After delivering a lecture, our first instinct might increasingly be to photograph the event and publicize it. Yet the more consequential professional act may occur afterward, when one student remains behind with a question. That five-minute conversation may influence a career more than thousands of online impressions. Presence or mindfulness is therefore not simply courtesy. It is a clinical, educational, and moral competency.
A profession flourishes when its members seek wisdom over visibility, contribution over performance, and presence over publicity. In an attention economy competing relentlessly for our devotion, protecting the capacity to attend deeply with mindfulness for our patients, learners, colleagues, ideas, and one another may be one of the most critical professionalism virtues and behaviors for 21st-century physicians.
Vijay Rajput is an internal medicine physician.
