Csikszentmihalyi’s central finding was that attention functions as psychic energy— a finite resource that depletes with use. Every piece of information that enters your awareness gets evaluated automatically. Does this threaten my goals? Does it support them? Is it neutral? That evaluation costs something, whether you want it to or not.
When information conflicts with your existing understanding, it creates what Csikszentmihalyi calls psychic entropy… a disorder in consciousness. Your attention fragments. Your ability to focus on what matters gets crowded out by the noise of competing claims, contradictory data, and unresolved questions.
The kicker: this isn’t a weakness you can train away. It’s the default state of the human mind. Left unmanaged, entropy wins.
Marcus Aurelius understood this two thousand years before the research caught up. In his Meditations, he wrote:
“Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’ But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.”
He wasn’t writing productivity advice. He was describing a defense posture. Protect your attention like it’s the only resource that truly matters… because it is.
Now apply that framework to the last several weeks of Iran war coverage.
In the first days of the conflict, the stated justification was nuclear. Iran was close to a weapon. The threat was existential and immediate. That’s why we moved.
Then the messaging shifted. Actually, it was ballistic missiles, underground facilities, the hardened sites, and the capability to strike US forces across the region.
Then a senior official suggested Israel was about to make a move, and we needed to preempt them. Hours later, that same official walked it back, insisting he’d been mischaracterized, that the context had been stripped from his words.
Then it was an imminent threat broad enough to contain almost anything.
Four justifications in less than a week, and even more since. Each one requires your brain to stop, recalibrate, absorb new framing, reconcile it with what you were told yesterday, and decide what to believe today.
That’s the scooter.
While your attention is occupied reconstructing the official timeline, the actual question— what this war is really about, who benefits, and at what cost— sits unresolved in the background. Precisely where some people prefer it.
The international version of this pattern is sharper and harder to look at directly.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the site of an Iranian missile strike in southern Israel recently and told the press, ‘In the last 48 hours, Iran targeted a civilian area. They’re doing that as a mass murder weapon… their intention is to murder civilians.’
That statement is documented. It is also being made by the same leader whose military’s own intelligence database— per reporting by +972 Magazine and the Guardian— shows that 83% of those killed in Gaza are civilians. Israel’s internal data. Not from the UN or Hamas. Israel’s own.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The UN Human Rights Council concluded Israel bears responsibility for genocide in Gaza.
These are not fringe accusations. They are the documented conclusions of international institutions operating from evidence.
Now hold both things in your mind simultaneously. A leader condemning the targeting of civilians while presiding over a campaign that his own military’s data shows killed civilians at a rate researchers say is nearly unparalleled in modern warfare.
Feel that friction?
That’s psychic entropy. Your brain is spending energy trying to reconcile two contradictory things that cannot both be true. And while it does, the underlying architecture of the conflict, the economics, geopolitics, strategic drivers… the truth… go unexamined.
The kids are screaming about the scooter. And dad is standing in the backyard trying to figure out who rode it first.
So, what should the dad have done?
Don’t adjudicate the scooter. Don’t audit yesterday’s grievances. Don’t try to determine which eight-year-old has the more compelling case. He came outside with one job. Do that job. Everything else is noise he chooses not to process.
That discipline has a name. Philosophers and scientists call it first principles thinking— the practice of stripping a problem down to its foundational truths and reasoning forward from there, rather than inheriting someone else’s framing of it.
So, you don’t need to determine which of the four justifications for the Iran war is accurate. Only notice that the justification keeps changing— and then ask what stays constant underneath while you’re busy keeping up.
The economics don’t change. The geography doesn’t change. The structural incentives don’t change. Those are first principles. The narrative changes. The narrative is the scooter.
First-principles thinking also means learning to deliberately discount certain voices based on pattern recognition. When a source has demonstrably shifted its position multiple times in a single week, that source has told you something important about how much weight its next statement deserves.
When an institution’s public statements are contradicted by its own internal data, that contradiction is the information.
Allocate your finite attention to sources and questions that have earned it, and consciously protect that bandwidth from the people and narratives designed to consume it without returning anything true.
Aurelius wasn’t trying to disengage from the world. He was trying to stop letting the world’s loudest voices decide what his mind worked on. That’s a choice. It’s always been a choice. But it’s damned harder to make now than it was in Rome.
The fight in the backyard is real. The scooter is real. The grievances are real. But the dad who gets pulled into adjudicating them has already failed at the only job he came outside to do.
Everything else is just two kids screaming about a scooter…
And somebody just handed them a microphone.
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“I don’t try to change minds… just deepen them.” — Tegan Broadwater
Tegan spent 13 years with the Fort Worth Police Department, including two years assigned to the FBI working deep undercover inside a violent Crip organization. That operation, detailed in his book Life in the Fishbowl, resulted in 51 convictions. He has since founded Tactical Systems Network, an armed security & protection firm primarily staffed by veterans, is a creative writer and musician, and hosts The Tegan Broadwater Podcast. All book profits benefit children of incarcerated parents. Learn more at TeganBroadwater.com
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