Attention: The Scarcest Luxury

On the train back from London on Tuesday, I read an article in the Economist that got me thinking about what The Athanor might offer. It reported something I hadn't expected: the ultra-rich are giving up on luxury goods.

The price of fine Bordeaux wines has fallen. Rolexes on the second-hand market are worth far less than they were a couple of years ago. Even billionaire mansions in San Francisco are being discounted by millions. After decades of rising prices for everything from vintage cars to aged whiskies, the market for plutocratic assets has turned bearish.

The explanation isn't that the wealthy are struggling. There are more billionaires than ever. The richest continue to increase their spending. What's changed is that luxury goods no longer feel luxurious. Lab-grown diamonds match real ones. Second-hand markets mean anyone with a bit of capital can access designer goods. Fractional ownership schemes let hundreds of people own a piece of a Rembrandt. The economist Thorstein Veblen argued that luxury depends on scarcity and rivalrousness, one person's consumption must diminish others' ability to have it. When everyone can access the finer things, they stop being fine.

So where has the money gone? Into experiences. A night at the finest Paris hotels costs twice what it did a few years ago. Key sporting event tickets have doubled in price. The cost of eating at three-Michelin-star restaurants has surged. The pattern is clear: the wealthy now compete for experiences that are genuinely time-bound, non-transferable, and inherently limited. You cannot resell a day spent at Wimbledon's Centre Court. You cannot fractionalise an evening at the Last Night of the Proms. These experiences are consumed in the consumption, which makes them properly scarce.

But even this feels incomplete. What those who value luxury are really buying, what all of us are increasingly desperate for, is something understood as sentiment when it is really disciplined attention. To love, in M. Scott Peck’s words, is to extend oneself for another’s growth. To lead, in practice, is to make that same extension visible, to give undivided focus to the well-being and potential of others. Weil reminds us that attention is the rarest form of generosity, and in a world saturated with distraction, it becomes the ultimate act of capacity.

Not distracted half-presence whilst scrolling through phones. Not automated responses from chatbots or standardised modules from online courses. Sustained, high-quality attention from someone who knows who values them for who they are, or might become.

It made me reconsider the work I've been developing for the past several years.

The Attention Economy Nobody's Discussing

We talk endlessly about the attention economy, how tech platforms compete for our focus, how we're all distracted, how information overwhelms us. But there's another attention economy we discuss less often: the market for receiving attention from genuinely skilled practitioners.

Most professional development exists in what might be called the fragile middle. Standardised courses. Scalable coaching. Competent enough, affordable enough, generic enough. These offerings work because they can serve thousands of people simultaneously. But this very scalability ensures they cannot offer what becomes valuable as everything else becomes accessible: genuine attention from someone with rare expertise, within a carefully curated group, over sustained time.

There are people who've spent decades developing a particular quality of presence. Not necessarily just through formal credentials, but through lived experience in complex situations. They've navigated high-uncertainty environments. They've built things, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. They've learned when to hold space for emergence and when to push for clarity. This judgment isn't teachable from a book; it's the accumulated residue of years of practice.

These are people who've developed what might be called wisdom, though they'd rarely use that word themselves. They know how to read a room. They spot patterns across seemingly unrelated domains. They can hold productive tension without rushing to resolution. They've made enough mistakes to recognise when others are about to make them, and enough successes to know that success itself can be hollow.

Many of them have left, or are ready to leave, the extraction-based models that rewarded their expertise. They don't want to build consultancies that scale. They don't want to create standardised programmes that can be replicated. They don't want to charge McKinsey prices that turn transformation into another positional statement of a resumé.

Yet the economic dynamics remain: what they offer is genuinely scarce. There are only so many hours in anyone's remaining years. There are only so many people one can work with deeply. Eight people in a group is about the limit before the quality of attention degrades. Eighteen months is roughly the minimum time for sustained transformation rather than temporary insight.

This scarcity is real, not manufactured. It creates value whether or not money changes hands.

Movement Logic Instead of Market Logic

A conversation with Claude, the AI I work with for thinking through complex problems, helped me see this differently. What if we retained luxury's economic dynamics but removed its market logic? What if this operated more like a movement or insurgency than a business?

Several things shift when you make this move.

Selection becomes about readiness rather than price. Not "can you afford this?" but "are you ready for this? Will you contribute? Can you be trusted?" This is more rigorous than financial filtering. Anyone can inherit money. Not everyone has the courage to leave extraction culture. Not everyone will do the work.

Growth happens through demonstration rather than scaling. The programme itself stays small, maintaining the quality of attention that makes it valuable, but the pattern spreads. Participants return to their contexts and create their own versions. Alumni become practitioners who start their own small groups. The practice propagates, but not through centralised control.

Status comes from contribution rather than consumption. The Blackfoot Nation measured wealth by what you gave away, not what you accumulated. In a movement, your standing comes from what you bring to others, knowledge shared, connections made, support offered, experiments tested. This inverts luxury culture whilst preserving its fundamental dynamic: there are still status hierarchies, but they're based on generosity rather than acquisition.

And crucially, the thing that makes it valuable, sustained attention within carefully curated groups, cannot be commodified or co-opted. Extraction culture can buy luxury goods. It struggles to absorb practices built on commitment and mutual support.

The eighteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham offers a model here. Never more than fourteen core members, meeting monthly by moonlight, very particular about who joined. No fees, no constitution, no publications. Yet these provincial philosophers and manufacturers catalysed the Industrial Revolution. Not through scaling, but through the quality of their thinking together and the influence they exerted on wider networks.

That's the territory being explored here: small groups, sustained engagement, careful curation, genuine transformation. Not a business in conventional terms. Not a charity either. Something closer to what the Situationist International called an insurgency, a deliberate challenge to dominant ways of working, creating a sanctuary for those ready to leave extraction behind.

What This Actually Means

I think that this is the work of the Athanor, named after the alchemists' furnace that burned with steady, patient heat. Not the dramatic fire of inspiration, but the constant warmth that allows transformation over time. It's designed for people in transition: senior professionals who've accumulated significant career capital but find themselves hollow, ready to redirect their expertise towards different ends.

But it's also for the people who want to help them. The practitioners who've developed rare capacity through lived experience. The ones who know how to hold space, who can see what others miss, who've earned the right to challenge because they've been challenged themselves. People who want to help others by being themselves, by offering sustained attention rather than packaged solutions.

The programme is deliberately exploratory rather than goal-based. No predetermined outcomes. No standardised processes. Paths are discovered, not prescribed. What's provided is the container, the "well-sealed vessel," as the alchemists called it, that holds the conditions for transformation without dictating what must emerge.

Groups limited to eight participants. The commitment is twelve to eighteen months. Regular meetings happen, but the real work occurs between them through sustained engagement with each other and with the questions that won't leave people alone. This isn't networking in any conventional sense. It's what the Lunar Society achieved: near-daily contact amongst local members, at least weekly exchange with distant ones, continuous collaboration on questions that matter.

The work needs people who are genuinely ready, not curious, but committed. People who bring something essential to the collective, even if they don't yet see it themselves. People who recognise that transformation requires dissolution first: the release of old patterns, identities and assumptions before new forms can crystallise.

What makes this different from luxury coaching or premium programmes is that participants pay primarily their attention. Money matters, practitioners need to sustain their work, but it's not the primary currency. The real cost is eighteen months of sustained presence. Of bringing whole selves. Of contributing to others' transformation as much as one's own. Of sitting with not-knowing. Of being changed by what emerges.

This self-selects powerfully. If someone is looking for efficient solutions, packaged insights or credential-building, this isn't it. If they're ready to leave extraction behind but don't yet know what comes next, if they've accumulated expertise they're ready to redirect, if they're willing to operate at edges where categories dissolve, then perhaps this is for them.

The same applies to those who might convene such spaces. If you've developed rare capacity through practice. If you know how to hold productive tension. If you're ready to help others by being fully present rather than by delivering content. If you measure success by what you've given rather than what you've accumulated. Then perhaps you're one of the practitioners this movement needs.

The Athanor in Brief

Who it serves: Senior professionals in transition. People leaving extraction-based careers to build work rooted in sufficiency, care and meaning. Those who've accumulated significant career capital and are ready to recontextualise what they possess.

Who convenes it: Practitioners who've developed wisdom through lived experience. People with the capacity to hold space, spot patterns, and offer sustained attention. Those ready to help others by being themselves rather than by scaling their expertise.

The commitment: Twelve to eighteen months. Small cohorts of up to eight participants. Regular gatherings plus continuous engagement between sessions.

What it offers: Sustained attention from experienced practitioners. Carefully curated spaces for exploration without predetermined goals. Guild-like structures that amplify small ideas. Protection for the "cracks" where original thinking emerges. Community support for transformation.

What it requires: Genuine readiness. Willingness to contribute to others' journeys. Tolerance for uncertainty. Commitment to sustained presence. The courage to dissolve old certainties before new possibilities crystallise.

What it isn't: Scalable. Standardised. Goal-oriented. Credential-granting. Comfortable. Quick.

The economic model: Sliding contribution based on capacity and value received. Those with resources contribute more. Those in transition contribute what they can. The work sustains itself through those who value it enough to support it. Diversity matters.

The broader purpose: Not just personal transformation, but preparation for different ways of working. Participants return to their contexts changed, capable of creating their own small groups, spreading patterns of practice that challenge extraction culture. This is insurgency work, a sanctuary and workshop for those ready to embrace and explore what dissolving conventional models leave behind in the spaces where AI cannot go.

If this resonates and you recognise yourself here, whether as someone seeking transformation or as someone ready to help others find it, and if you're ready rather than merely curious, reach out. The next cohort is being assembled now.

There are only eight places at the fire in the first, experimental, creative cohort.

Who knows what we might find beyond the shallow world of performance?