Novelty
The universe's infinitude guarantees that the ratio of what we perceive in any moment to what we could contains more zeroes than can be written with all the world's ink. It is a decimal so paltry, so continually diminishing, that it approaches nonexistence. Only our time alive surpasses our attention in its scarcity. This truth, more than any other, carves the grooves through which human experience runs.
Scarcity recruits economy. Economy recruits process. The process our mind uses to involuntarily filter our attention for what matters most hinges on a single quality: novelty, for the new arrives in a shroud, bearing perhaps bounty or sword, prosperity or peril, boom or bust—those poles of fate that finite beings steeped in infinity cannot afford to ignore.