The Almighty Attention Span

I was at a barbecue. There were lots of people around, eating, and at some point one of my cousin’s kids rode their Schwinns into the yard.

One boy leapt off his bike and sidled up to me.

“It’s so quiet out here,” the boy remarked in stupefied wonder.

At that moment, I realized the kid was absolutely right. All the barbecue goers—and these were mostly older people—were playing on their phones. Numbed by the opiate glows of their touchscreens.

Everyone was thumbing away on their respective devices. I was horrified. Namely because I, a lonesome voice in the wilderness, a simple man longing for a less technological era, was currently ordering cat food on Amazon.

Because phones are what we do.

Not just us Americans. Everyone. Phones are just who we are now.

I was in Europe recently. I stood in the Galleria dell’Accademía di Firenze, inches from the statue of Michelangelo’s David. And almost nobody was looking at the statue. They were all take a selfies posing in front of David’s you-know-what-ie.

Shortly thereafter, I left the gallery and I saw an Italian woman and her children on the street, begging for food from English speaking tourists. She held up a sign which read, “God Bless” She too was scrolling TikTok. So were her kids.

Each time someone put money in her basket the tourists took a selfie with her.

Scientific evidence isn’t good. Research shows that the average human attention span is shrinking by a lot.

Twenty years ago, for example, brain researchers measured attention spans in adults. They were shocked to realize the average attention span had been reduced from 10 minutes to two and a half minutes.

But that was 20 years ago. Things have changed in two decades. Recently, similar research measured our current attention spans and discovered that on average we only pay attention—brace yourself—40 seconds.

In a few years, some scientists predict our attention spans will be somewhere around 15 seconds.

“This a huge change in society,” one well-known researcher said. “It means that… I’m sorry, what were we talking about again?”

So if you’ve read this far, I want you to know that I’m not complaining. But I do want to point out that there was a time when we used to pay attention for long periods.

It was great. You could sit down and read a book for hours without ever getting up to check your phone. Mostly because the only phones we had were in the kitchen and were heavy enough to be used as murder weapons in Hitchcock plots.

But those days are gone. And even I am not silly enough to think we can get them back. Technology will keep upgrading. Phones will keep getting better. And eventually, they will be able to surgically implant our devices into our you-know-what-ies.

Even so, there must be something we can do about all this. There must be a way to prevent us from becoming a civilization with the neurological activity of peat moss.

I asked my cousin's kid what he thought about the subject.

“How do we get our attention spans back?” I said.

The boy shrugged. He jumped back on his Schwinn. “Maybe we should all ride bikes.”

“Maybe,” I replied. And then I went back to ordering cat food.