Attention Spans and What I’m Gonna Do About Them
By: Anselm Pascal
Tags: Movies, Books And Authors, Social Media, Philosophy, Lifestyle

Bro we really did have the capacity to rp entire chapters on Google+ bro we DID that bro we really did

Ok, so, perusing Medium again, and I think it hit me, again, the shift that The People of the Webs are making as far as entertainment, social media, and attention spans goes. This might take a bit of explaining but I’m pretty sure we’re on the same page about what I’m about to talk about so bear with me.

So I have this bet going with my sister and it’s about…five years old I think? That she’ll get a Facebook during the time she is a teenager. When I made this bet I had no doubt in my mind I would win. Now she’s in high school and still going strong with no social media at ALL. Part of this I’m sure is due to the nerve of my sister being a 70-year-old little lady already, but no, she has informed me that her peers laughed when she mentioned Facebook at highschool; they said and I QUOTE (quote my sister who is paraphrasing her friends) “Facebook is for moms and grandmas.” The nerve! Is this what it means to age already?! What in tarndarnation heck?! Probably what is so affronting about such daring statements is that I know they’re right. I still defend the ownership of my Facebook page zealously given it is a masterpiece of curated content, known for Cultivated Anselm MemesTM, but I’m afraid I have to admit even my wall is not much more than a collection of exhausting baby boomers hitting that “share” button repeatedly on political memes that make them feel justified and roast the other side with inhumane insults (stoking their little virtue-signaling hearts), millennials actually using Facebook as Facebook was intended to be used (instead of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Tumblr all being one conglomerate meme universe??), blissfully unaware of the dying world it is, bless their hearts, and finally, you know it, memes.

Man, I’m still heated lol. But let me soak up some coffee provided it’s in front of a window with a pretty view with people of all sorts passing by, and let’s pull this apart, friends.

I think we know why this is, right? Why social media can be a diseasious world? Before we get there let me also mention another aspect of media that’s exhausting us. This is why I began this story with mentioning Medium, as the other day when I was rummaging around here I was struck by the style of so many articles being listical-ly short. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place here on the planet of Medium, and I’m loving it more and more. But uh, man, it’s not just me noticing these doctored articles with hardly more than a sentence per paragraph, right? I’ve read several authors’ posts on How to Write an Article now, each saying that

You should keep your paragraphs short for your reader.

Otherwise, they’ll get bored.

So don’t do that.

That’s how you’ll make it big on Medium.

That’s exaggeration for sure, but you get the gist and you also know what I’m getting at: all these writers on Medium, all these big brains at Facebook, Instagram, every golden light filtered model on Insta, any modern movie done so quirkily these days, they’re all competing for our attention. And it’s a dying art, bruh. How can you fight for something that barely exists anymore? Let me beat a dead horse a little more, just so you can be sure you’re seeing what I’m seeing; every single app having a story feature now, Facebook merging their Instagram and Messenger platforms (which, by the way, why did anyone think that was a good idea?? Everything was so compartmented for me before smh), every article on Medium having a reading time estimate and calculated voice, and bro, it’s even in movies! Marvel movies are done with this ironic, 4th wall breaking humor, sitcoms create such a zany, dumb interaction as to hyperstimulate our funny bones, and films like Jojo Rabbit, Emma, and Little Women, even, are done with this tongue-in-cheek art or aesthetic since relying on the genre itself is too boring for the world of today.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I thought Jojo Rabbit was brilliant, and Little Women stole my heart. All these Medium writers,

As I say,

With their short paragraphs

And blunt statements

are making much more than I am so maybe I should put my foot in my mouth while I can still fit it. BUT

But

I don’t think I’m wrong in saying all of our attention spans are in sore shape, and for the most part we’re disassociated from social media as a part of life, and it is now in the shape it is as described above. Facebook is for moms and grandmas and the few clingers from when it was big, and movies, social media, and creators are spazzing out to cling to us. IN this ESSAY i WILL —

I’m not the first to notice this and I’m sure y’all will be corroborating this conclusion yourselves given your own experience: our attention spans and pursuit of enjoyment is suffering. Aren’t we all frustrated with this in our own lives? The pandemic has had us all rushing to our childhood loves and passions with desperation — more so than before/otherwise I believe, in the event a pandemic didn’t happen — and I think a depressing number of us are unable to thrive on it the same anymore. Sure, part of it is likely due to the fact we absorbed every possible emotion from the Harry Potter books and they’re dead now, but that doesn’t excuse our inability to sit with a book for hours, sinking into it until it’s all that exists in time and space. Watching a movie is an event that one must prepare for rather than throwing on a lazy sitcom that you can check your phone during. It’s a lot easier to pull up Instagram and surf for an hour “responding to emails” before leaving for errands rather than “wasting time” reading a book. This effect of poisoned life quality not only enhances our anxiety and depression, but it’s also made us quite sad. It’s not just depressing that our old loves, even our favorite vampires and tributes that we would have DIED for when we were 12, don’t matter as much to us anymore, it’s sad. It’s not just worrying that we can’t focus on an assignment that would have been fun when we were a thriving writer at 14 but instead are now paralyzed because it’s going to receive a grade, it’s sad. It’s REALLY sad that I have so many books I want to read, and can’t sit with them for more than a chapter or two before impulsively checking my phone. And then diddle around between three apps for hours with my book open in lap, ignored (and sobbing (well maybe not sobbing but my inner child and Anselm-that-is-done-with-the-modern-world-and-its-problems are sobbing (it’s a lie, the book is sobbing, I’m sobbing, we’re all sobbing like men who have been holding up walls for too long and no one asks us about our feelings (us? I meant them, I’m definitely not one. I’m a real man I don’t have feelings) because this world sucks and we’re tired of life and us being this way))).

What are we to do? I find that there are a fair number of creators or go-getters who have been able to balance their lives and keep social media in its place in their lives, and for sure there are those who have it figured out in general, are happy in this day and age. Naturally we all know the trope of them then selling their over-priced “My Way to Happiness and my Beach Body (but believe me, it’s all about health!! Be kind to your body!! But I gotta say, having my gorgeous, sexy one makes me pretty happy and confident which is why I have over 200 posts of it)” and they’ll talk about living your OWN dreams, staying committed to routines, not letting anyone else define your life for you, and here’s the thing, they are not wrong. I really do have respect for people who have travelled the hard road of making (not finding) happiness and living as healthily as possible, considering I got nuggets from Micky D’s an hour ago. However, something tells me most of us just don’t want it to be a fight all the time. We can schedule time for social media to be in its place, but we shouldn’t have to fight it all the time. That’s a hard task in itself, given the world’s top scientists have perfected distraction technology. And even if we managed it ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to ignore the looming global awareness that this age of technology is changing our lives and we’re infants in this new world of internet communication and the philosophy of psychology.

Photo by Z S on Unsplash

I don’t know, lads. Here’s the thing. This is what’s happening, this national disenchantment and dissatisfaction with entertainment. There are personal solutions to find our own meaning and happiness to solve at least the individual-level endless wander for meaning aspect of it, but some of us are concerned about what’s to happen — or what should happen — regarding the historical life of this event. One angle to consider it on is the prediction of what will be the next hot thing? During the 2010s the iPhone and the app expansion tended to be the talk of the day. “There’s an app for that” was a joke used regarding a problem for anything. Teens today are primarily on TikTok, right? Personally, I’ve experienced that they aren’t necessarily as enthused about it as my generation was with Snapchat, so is it a question of whether apps themselves will die away, or will there be a new one that’s all the rage? Another question is whether apps are now a permanent part of life for the foreseeable future or if they’ll be replaced with some new form of a human mental concoction of technology or a rise of a different philosophical age. I guess my main disquietude regarding this thread of thought isn’t all that special from fretful fraughts that your average Bob or Catherine encounters once in a while (or, if you’re an empath, it’s never-ending); will our nation end, will there be another World War, will things continue in roughly the same vein for a couple hundred years, will we begin our space existence, will robots become a part of life, will some currently-inconceivable (I undeviatingly cannot read/hear that word without hearing Vizzini in my soul) product or idea seize the world, and the list goes on.

Evidently, there’s not really anything we can do to predict those futures. Any or all or none of the above might happen, and they might not. SO let’s not bother worrying about all that right now, and instead focus on what IS happening, blah blah blah disenchantment. As far as us children of the internet go, I am hoping the internet world-village of the SuperWhoLockian era (I feel like I’m summoning spirits of the dead saying that) will realize this superficial part of our lives and not put up with it anymore. I wonder that social media will warp entirely and become what it was meant to be, a groupchat with people you actually know, and we will all return to our books, where large corporations can’t invade our absorption of content and distract us.

But of course as soon as y’all read that alarm bells be goin off, right? How could we throw away the wonderful world of the internet? Perhaps it grows more contorted and abstract every day, but it still offers a refuge for nerds, a delightful, creative fount of memes, and internet friends. And annoyingly it’s not as simple as removing news sources and people that are sometimes negative from your feeds because they eventually work themselves back in, right? It just doesn’t seem likely there could be a compartmentalization of the internet into different realms of News, Politicians, Countries, Fandoms, Games, etc., resembling a Ready Player One universe, and that’s because 1) it would defeat the spirit of the internet being an open universe and 2) sort of the same reason, we can’t govern individuals what they’re going to post and share on their webs. Maybe what will happen is an organized white suburban version of the internet will appear, possibly in the form of an app, that most everyone ends up contouring to rather than marauding through the chaos that is Tumblr every day. It’s funny I write that cuz Medium is almost like that. All of our fonts and styles are limited to a certain spectrum. But since our country is also one that prizes freedom I doubt a scenario of classist internets, a War of the Roses but with webs, would ever crystalize into reality. (I’m just now realizing I might be hitting ideas for novels and revealing them to the world, but don’t worry, I have no idea what to do with this information. This article matters to me??)

Cripes, friends. Once again, we can’t really predict what will happen, and if it will be for the better or for the worse. So maybe it does come down to all we can do is individual decisions about how we’re going to live our lives. For my part, I refuse to let my attention span be left so derelict. I will not insult the silly creativity that my loved sitcoms The Good Place and Parks and Rec possess and have a place in my life, nor will I turn my back completely on the seriously brilliant, voice-of-the-poor-class-of-today’s-society art form of memes (all about mocking the rich am I right). But I really do miss the commitment and love I had to reading, practicing music for more than two hours and not even noticing, and a good romp with friends without worrying about whether it’s Instagram worthy or not. I am sure there is a magic of childhood that will always be lost, but CS Lewis tells us we will one day be old enough to read fairy tales again. I’m too impatient to wait. And I believe there are many of like mindset, too, which is one reason, for example, I write these long and complicated stories. I love that Medium asks us to write a story, first of all, and not an article. I think humans have loved stories for far longer as a method of learning rather than informative listicals (though both are lovely :). And I am aware it is certainly a lot to ask of my readers to sit with my writing and attentively pore through it, rather than skim through as is habit and expected behavior with almost all content and primarily articles these days; but I believe in what I’m doing and I will continue to do so. A personal maxim must be followed, after all, and if you’re sitting here reading this by THIS point after all my rambling, you probably want to do the same pursuit of our old attention spans. I also rely on a reward that all writers live by: a smile from at least one person that our words made laugh, or have a thought they like. Finally, I say all this with an immortal hope that my stories will only ever improve and that I will learn from those successful Medium writers on this planet, if only to achieve good art and provide more beauty for the world and my readers, and also thank them. As any opera singer who has routined for decades, any TED talker who has listeners, and any athlete with legions of fans, I have been gifted with your time and the allowance to seep into your brain with words and ideas that you now cannot erase entirely. Quite an intimate gift, and I hope you take that seriously, dorky though this poeticism is (seriously, I’m unironically rolling my eyes at myself), and apply it to whatever you’re letting into your life.

That is my goal subjectively regarding this phenomena of attention and happiness relative to it, though don’t be fooled if you’re taking this post as evidence my donut-loving heart is off the struggleboat. If you’re here recently I pass out cookies and memes weekly :) But as far as globally offering a solution or solving, specifically, America’s epidemic of depression, I quaintly and in the true spirit of a white gal or hyggelig Catholic priest with these types of homilies, am recalled of a saying from an author bud of mine which I’ve left a quote of in an artsy picture below. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter which way this specific branch of the world will turn. As at every period of history, there will always be famous bold people changing the world, amazing philosophers and writers changing the values of a nation, brilliant inventors who progress civilization, but before and after each change, and rarely historically recognized, are people helping others and changing the world into a better place, not just a different one. Each of them, I can guarantee you, were only concerned about making the lives of those around them better. I think I can take something from that, honestly (even though I do an AMAZING job of harvesting memes for my frens. I can always do more).

Once again, thank you for reading this story, and enduring my preachy lil rambles :) Friendly reminder to make a list of who you’re supposed to write Christmas cards to this year, and friendly reminder that that should be an ENJOYABLE activity.

Till next time, ma dudes