Lousy Attention Spans

Have you ever been telling a story, or having a conversation, and you can visibly see the person on the other end losing interest? They can't wait to change the topic or interrupt you to say their part.

This could be chalked up to regional speaking styles: people in the Northeast are more likely to interrupt and talk over each other whereas someone from the Midwest might stare at you blankly after you stop, waiting to be sure that you are finished speaking.

I have no doubt that that plays a role. In my family, our conversations have always felt more like a battle to be heard over the other person; each person speaks louder and quicker with each countering sentence until both parties end up frustrated that they didn't really get to say the things that they wanted.

What I've noticed is that this seems to be happening more and more often, with people it wouldn't have happened with in the past. A sarcastic person might note that maybe I should be more interesting; that it's a me problem. This might be so, but I also think that attention spans have been speeding down a steep hill over the last two decades.

Technology to Blame as Usual!

Who or what is to blame for this? A multitude of things for sure, but I think that chief among them has been technology and the myriad ways of consuming it.

In the contemporary world, people spend an insane amount of hours online on some form of digital device. We do a lot of reading, or at least the literate among us, but we spend that time reading short articles, reading headlines, reading messages from co-workers, reading emails, reading poorly-written, casual text messages, reading subtitles on tv, reading TikTok captions...you get the idea. I bet the average reader might be more willing to read an article that is peppered with photos, bold headers to break up the text (like my post!), and under 12 paragraphs. How many of you are willing to sit and read an entire Atlantic article?

I've always known people that enjoy reading books and those that don't. If you're not particularly good at reading, of course you won't enjoy long books. Personally, I enjoy reading history textbooks and woodworking books. I can also get carried away reading lengthy blog posts on people's personal websites. I am less likely to read fiction or poetry books. We all have our genres we prefer. I tend to prefer reading if it's helping me learn something new, or if it's opening my mind to new ideas or ways of looking at the world.

However, let's consider how much people would read before mobile apps, before the internet, before video games, before television, and before magazines. As these new forms of entertainment have entered the mainstream over the century, not only have they provided an extra form of entertainment/recreation, they have also replaced in-depth reading for the majority of people.

What I worry about, is that with the decrease in lengthy reading, attention spans are getting worse. It is annoying to be on the opposite end of someone that cannot be bothered with what you have to say if it takes more than three seconds to get out of your mouth. I am of the opinion that there is a decrease of critical thinking.

We live in a world that invites lazy thinkers, but needs critical thinkers. Lazy thinkers do not challenge authority. They don't challenge the status quo. They accept that things are just how they are. How do you spread long-lasting ideas with just soundbites and 30-second clips? You might capture some primitive emotions but you won't get people thinking much beyond that, and that's often the intention. Lazy thinking leads to complacency.

Attention Span Economy

"Why should I spend my time reading books when I can get the information quickly from a YouTube video? On top of that, I can learn many types of things in the time it would take me to read one chapter of a book!"

Let's use my woodworking and history interests as some examples where the attention span economy stinks. There are lots of woodworking videos on YouTube. You can find videos with beautiful editing and 10-minute tutorials on how to do get something done, but there's very few long-form videos that show projects from end-to-end at project speed, especially with hand tools. The only one I can really think of is Paul Sellers. Meanwhile, you can fill your head with woodworking books that describe techniques in detail, provide alternate techniques, tutorials for furniture, ideas and inspiration, philosophizing, and even teach you some history of the craft or history of the furniture.

Personally, one of my favorite books of all time is a woodworking book that sort of doubles as a philosophical book. I can truly say that it's changed my way of thinking.

History may be a more obvious example of the differences. YouTube history videos are typically in the ten to twenty minute range. Sometimes you find some that have been painstakingly animated, or researched, but usually you get AI-generated images while someone drones on over the images. It's lazy production where the "creator" clearly does not care about the topic, nor the viewer. They just want to get views and make some money.

There are a few series that provide entertaining light overviews of topics rather quickly, but you won't get the kind of detail you'd get from a history book on the topic. I have a Bachelor's Degree in History, and let me tell you, history textbooks have a certain level of density you'd never find in fiction. The amount of time it takes to read through one page is remarkably slower than a novel. One needs to WANT to read the book to get past the first paragraph.

Of course plenty of books are aimed at the more mainstream market, which makes the reading a little lighter but still far more informative than short-form content could ever be. You can watch a quick video about Cicero, or you can read the biography by Anthony Everitt and learn in depth about his life. In the process, you learn what the Rome of Cicero's time was like: its holiday and civic traditions, the way law enforcement or lack of law enforcement worked, the naming pattern Romans used for their children, what legal arguments looked like with Cicero (the standards were pretty low compared to modern times). You get a lot more information than simply that Cicero was renowned for his oratorical skills and that he didn't support Julius Caesar's actions.

Before YouTube history videos, there was The History Channel which is a mix of garbage reality television now, but previously it was jokingly referred to as the World War II channel because they showed mostly WWII programs. Any programs the History Channel aired, was always condensed to a thirty-minute or sixty-minute format and reduced to few details because one cannot assume the viewer knows all of the surrounding history on the given topic. A textbook could provide all of that context and far more detail.

Oversimplification of Others

Another problem that I encounter is that people lack nuance, and it's only getting worse. I believe this moves in parallel to the short attention spans and, especially, lazy thinking. The lazy thinker would state that I am opining on how terrible attention spans have become thanks to technology and modern media, so it must mean that I think that all modern media is bad. Hardly so. There are good, educational, long-form videos on YouTube that teach history well. You need to make sure they weren't lazily edited with AI and have some generic narration over it though. One must still be discerning to weed through the garbage. For every 30 second generic "Intro to Programming" video you can find on YouTube, you can find in depth, detailed lessons on specific programming topics that actually help you learn something.

Podcasts are another area where it's a mixed blessing/curse. There are some genuinely funny podcasts, and then there's thousands of podcasts that never needed to exist, but only do because some friends thought they had a unique idea that thousands of others have already thought of: "Oh man, our conversations are hilarious. We should totally start a podcast." For every 100 horrible Joe Rogan-style IQ-obliterating bro-casts out there, there's a great, well-researched, educational podcast. Dan Carlin's history podcasts, for example, are top notch. Episodes are typically three hours long and many of his topics come in a serial format.

Guilty? You bet I am

If you think that I am coming across as holier-than-thou, fear not, for I am guilty of indulging in the short-attention economy. I could spend hours on Instagram Reels if I wanted to. It's easy to lose track of time. It should be apparent from this post that I also watch a lot of YouTube videos. There is also Spotify. I love Spotify and cannot foresee ever giving it up, but it has ruined the listening experience in many ways.

Occasionally I'll pull out my CDs and pop them into the CD player in my truck and intentionally listen to an entire album rather than throw on a Spotify playlist and hit shuffle. I find that listening to the music like that will actually make me more attentive to the musical experience and I get more out of it.

In a Johnny Cash mood? Throw on a playlist on Spotify, but if you really want to experience Johnny Cash, listen to Johnny Cash IV: The Man Comes Around and appreciate the theme of the album that was the last one he released before his death. He had recorded six of the album's songs previously, but they take on new weight with his aged, weak voice, all of the songs on the album touching on death or hinting at death in some way, finally ending with a cover of Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" which feels like an appropriate final sign-off to his musical career.

So What's the Answer?

Where was I again? Oh yeah, short attention spans!

So is there a solution to this problem? Probably not on a grand, society-wide scale. On an individual level, it takes the realization that you can gain deeper personal enrichment when giving total focus to something. It's easy to pass the time consuming a bunch of things with little focus, but when engaging more deliberately and more patiently with a topic, you will really start to notice how your brain is tempted to jump around and think about other things. It's not a good feeling and it takes intention to avoid falling back into the same traps.

Try reading proper books and avoiding the time-consuming technology after a certain hour. Set goals to learn something in depth. If you find yourself on YouTube, maybe take a look at how people used to speak during old interviews or news broadcasts, or even the average person, and contrast it to the simplified speech people use in 2026. David Hoffman has lots of archival footage on his YouTube account that is interesting to check out. People were not smarter in the past, but they did not have the intense distractions that we have now, and it is apparent in hearing how they speak on things.

If you've made it to the end of this blog post, then you've read more words on a single topic than the average person I encounter does on most days. That's twenty-six paragraphs by the way. Congratulations, I guess…