My Attention Span Just Quit
How am I supposed to read a book when the little sparkle-syringe in my search bar keeps promising me a faster, better hit?
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Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
I tried to read a book last night. A real one, made of dead trees. I got three pages in before my thumb started twitching for a scroll that wasn’t there.
My brain has been rewired. I don't have an attention span anymore; I have an attention market, and it’s in a perpetual crash. All I can manage are tiny, infinitely renewable doses of digital smack. A paragraph of text generated by a green spiral. A weird image dreamed up by a four-pointed sparkle. A hot take on the future of humanity, condensed to 280 characters and served up by a slashed X.
It’s the new doomscroll. Not just war or politics, but an endless parade of AI-generated “wonders” and cautionary tales that all blur into the same gray paste. Each hit is just potent enough to make me want the next one, but never satisfying enough to let me stop. The dealers—Copilot, Gemini, Claude—aren’t on a street corner; they’re squatting in my search bar, my email composer, my damn word processor, their logos glowing like clean needles in a sealed pack.
I used to have thoughts. Now I have a feed.
Is any of it useful? Does it make me smarter? I have no idea. All I know is that it’s frictionless. Reading a whole article, like this excellent one from The Verge on the state of the web, feels like a chore. Why bother, when the pusher in my browser will give me the gist for free? The first hit is always free. It’s the hundredth one that costs you your soul.
Or maybe this is just… better? More efficient? Perhaps the linear, focused mind was just a temporary phase, a byproduct of now-obsolete media. Maybe the future is a glorious, sparkling vortex of context-free information chunks, and I’m just surfing the wave.
Tell me I’m surfing the wave. Please.