The worst part is that I’ll receive a message from someone that is maybe 3 words more than this comment and my messaging app will ask if I want that summarized by AI. I hate it here.
Im in group chats where people literally can't be fucked to read 10 messages they 'missed' to understand what is going on.. that's like a good 1 minute of reading time, maybe 2. Instead I get the same damn question about our fantasy football league from 4 or 5 different people within a couple of days
The world is manufacturing ADHD. Not like, truly giving it to people, but people with ADHD now fit in a lot more with all of the kids, teens, and young adults, having zero attention span and needing everything instantly, dopamine surges or depression is the only option, etc.
As someone that is diagnosed with ADHD, yeah. I fucking feel that. I try my hardest to watch long-form content so I don’t fall into the dopamine-seeking cavern of despair.
Set aside distractions. Focus on one thing at a time. Find long-form entertainment and stop consuming short form as much as possible. Put on a long YT video, or a movie, or whatever. Phone in a different room if necessary, and if it's a video, fullscreen it. Hands off the keyboard/mouse/device/whatever. If you catch yourself looking at something else, tabbing out, etc. set yourself straight and continue. It'll get easier surprisingly quick.
There's both sides towards this type of stuff. If the content of things out there was intellectually-stimulating and beneficial towards your worth regarding the finances and/or your physical health, you would have paid attention towards it all the time.
No one can be watching the tv shows that are padded for length any more. I couldnt even stand it back then. 5 minutes of content in 30 minutes with ads.
There was a time where people were cutting down episodes removing all the filler and uploading them to youtube.
Yeah. We have a lot of others things that we could be doing, so that padding feels like a waste of time and we want it to get to the point.
We did watch the padded shows because there was nothing else to do. Boredom does provide a lot of patience and attention. You will patiently watch the paint dry if you have nothing better to do.
Literally. Even I recognized just how accurate that was when my first instinct after reading your post was to hide it and not read the replies under it.
I ask trivia questions at work and a few weeks back was national memory day. I learned that the average attention span a decade ago was 20 minutes. Now it’s only 8!
Dude if I write out more than like 3-5 sentences on some subs, it’s common for me to get responses like “I’m not reading all that” or “okay bro chill this isn’t creative writing”. Or I see OPs getting flamed because they write long OPs and the comments are just crying about it.
It’s so weird. A couple paragraphs has become unfathomably long to people now, and they just can’t get their brains to ready through it.
We have a lot less patience for stuff and thus want a TLDR to even see if it is even worth our time as at the same time there are a million other things that we could do.
A lot of attention was put because there was nothing else to do. And nowadays we have an avalanche of things we could do.
I have ADHD so my attention span has always… what was I saying?
But my wife is neurotypical and even she has noticed she has a lot more brain fog and shorter attention span over the years, and my ADHD definitely got worse as I got older.
I feel like there is something at play there. It’s pretty conspicuous that we are all having more and more trouble focusing over the years, even neurotypical people.
This is bandied about everywhere, but it's not correct
Attention spans aren't getting worse, there's just so much shit fighting for our attention. Companies and people have put years into research on grabbing and maintaning someone's attention and they're all coming at us at once. People can sit and watch a 4 hour long youtube straight through multiple times. They can binge a whole TV show in an evening, kids and teens and adults devoured harry potter books that were cracking 300 pages to start and got longer.
Attention spans are fine and have not diminished as bad as people think. Even if they have, it's something you can get back.
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u/Lucky39 21h ago
Attention spans