Our personal attention is a resource for them, not just our money, our precious attention. We have withdrawn our attention and they need it, so keep denying them your attention. I won’t even post about or mention their shows, events, incidents, characters in the play. Herbert Simon, Nobel prize in economics realized this and wrote about it 30 years ago. Your attention is a power, a force, a sustenance.

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Yup, if you are kind then you become a target and if you are perceived as unkind then they feed on that void and look for more buttons to push. You will not be able to plead for quiet or use logic to stop them, rather it sometimes requires an appearance of insanity on your part to actually stop it when it is really bad. If you are not giving them the required 100% focus, they will just get noisier and noisier with their attempts to crack your space and get you to blow a cork so then they can get in with that. They can do this passively by routine noises which become louder and more abrupt if you continue to ignore them. I noticed this strange high-alert neediness coming on prior to the pandemic when I put my earbuds in to escape the crazy-making. PAY ATTENTION TO ME, look at this picture on my phone, have a bite of my food, have a sip of my drink, ...and they usually start this crap by walking into a room talking to you like you were not already focused on something else.