Our attention spans are now shorter than a squirrel on crack

The chances of you getting to the end of this article are terrible. I know this because research from UC Irvine shows that people now have a median attention span of only 40 seconds, a massive 75% decline over the last 20 years. This skittish, squirrel-like lack of focus is caused by a myriad digital distractions and self-interruption.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever officially had attention deficit disorder but I seem to have worsening symptoms over the last few years. As I sit down to write this, I feel a magnetic pull to my phone. Like feral, urban squirrels full of crack, we’re hardly able to invest more than a few seconds in any narrative.

We’re increasingly more easily distracted, darting from one trash can full of narcotics to the next. The stories – if we can be so generous as to call them that – we mostly consume are junk food for our brains. The refined sugar treats we know are bad for us, but impossible to resist.

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Advertising practitioners, spurred by the best-practice recommendations from big tech, are contributing to the frenzy. Rather than focus on quality, they throw a few more drugs in the trash can in the hope that they can grab a few seconds. In contrast, people will sit through a three-hour podcast or go down a 45-minute YouTube rabbit hole on something they care about.

Of course, there is a case for incisive storytelling. Most good narratives are brutally simple and hook you in from the very first second. But people don’t engage with content because it’s short.

They engage with it because it’s good. The issue isn’t attention, it’s what earns it. And increasingly, what earns it is not narrative, or craft, but primarily dopamine and/or outrage. We’ve moved from a world of interruption to a world of addiction.

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