Borrowed Attention – Jakarta, Indonesia

Jakarta, Indonesia — July 2022
The old square of Batavia in the old Jakarta carries its past lightly. Colonial facades fading under tropical sun, bicycles for rent, tourists drifting between shadows and open heat. It feels staged, almost — history arranged just enough to be photographed, but not quite enough to be understood.

I was walking across the square in the late afternoon when he approached me.

Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Indonesian. Thin, energetic, dressed carefully in a way that tried not to look like effort. He smiled before speaking — the kind of smile that arrives half a second early, rehearsed but hopeful.

“Hello, sir,” he said. “Can I ask you something?”

His English came in pieces, but with confidence. He wanted to take a photo together. For his Instagram. He showed me the page — a grid of faces, mostly foreigners, each one captured in the same frame: him slightly leaning in, smiling, proof that he had touched something beyond his own world.

“I want to be influencer,” he said, with a seriousness that didn’t invite irony.

There was no embarrassment in it. No hesitation. Just a clear equation: visibility equals value.

We talked for a few minutes. Where I was from. What I did. He nodded at everything, storing details the way someone might collect small coins — not because they’re valuable, but because they might add up to something later.

Behind him, the square moved slowly. A group of tourists negotiating prices for bicycles. A vendor pushing a cart of drinks. The sun dropping just enough to make everyone look better than they felt.

He adjusted his phone, checked the angle. “One photo, yes?”

Then, mid-sentence, his eyes shifted.

A girl had just entered the square — young, blonde, unmistakably foreign in the way that draws attention without asking for it. She wasn’t doing anything in particular. Just walking. But in that moment, she was more visible than anything else around her.

He looked back at me briefly, just long enough to register the calculation.

“Sorry,” he said quickly — not apologetic, just efficient — and then he was gone.

No hesitation. No closing sentence. Just a clean transfer of attention, like switching channels.

I watched him approach her with the same smile, the same opening line, the same small ambition carefully carried in his pocket.

And it worked. She stopped. She laughed. The conversation began again, as if it had always belonged to her.

I stood there for a moment longer than necessary, not offended, not surprised — just aware of how transparent the whole exchange had been.

It wasn’t personal. It was never meant to be.

In a world where attention is currency, you don’t spend it where it holds less value. You move it. Quickly. Efficiently. Without sentiment.

For him, I had been a possibility. She was a better one.

The square continued its slow rhythm. The light softened. Someone nearby was posing for a photograph, adjusting their smile between shots.

I walked to the face of a nearby colonial building.

Seeping my drink, I thought about him — not with judgment, but with a kind of reluctant recognition. There was something almost honest in the way he moved through the world. No pretending. No illusions about fairness. Just a simple rule: go where the attention flows.

It’s easy to dismiss that as shallow. But then again, most of us spend our lives doing a more polite version of the same thing.

Only we take longer to admit it.