The Death of Attention
Transcript
Most people can’t stay with anything for longer than 90 seconds. Not a feeling. Not an idea. Not a moment of silence. Not even a podcast episode. They scroll past, interrupt, change the subject, or zone out—and they don’t even realize they’re doing it. But this isn’t just distraction. This is erosion. The inability to sit with anything is rewiring how we think, how we feel, how we connect, and how we make meaning. And if we don’t start naming what it’s doing to us, we’ll lose more than our focus. We’ll lose our depth, our patience, our relationships—maybe even our grip on reality.
Let’s be clear: this is bigger than a short attention span. It’s a kind of psychological flinching. The second something becomes uncomfortable, or unstructured, or unresolved, people bail. Not because they’re weak, and not because they’re stupid. But because their nervous systems have been trained to equate discomfort with danger and boredom with failure. We’ve created a cultural ecosystem where internal stillness feels like suffocation. And presence—actual, sustained presence—feels unbearable.
You see it in conversation. The moment something slows down, people fill the air. The second a story turns emotional, they pivot to advice. The minute a question doesn’t have a clear answer, they crack a joke or change the topic. We’ve gotten so used to escaping the moment that staying in it feels foreign. Unnatural. Even threatening.
The digital world has made this worse, but it didn’t start there. This goes back to the way we were raised. Many people were never taught to sit with their own emotions. They were told to move on, calm down, toughen up. Feelings became something to get rid of quickly, not something to understand. So now, when emotion arises—grief, frustration, confusion, even joy—it gets cut off before it can take root. Because the habit isn’t staying. The habit is escaping.
And when you pair that with technology that offers an endless stream of novelty, you get a brain that never learns how to endure. Because why would it? Why stay with something hard when you can refresh the feed and feel something new? Why tolerate silence when there’s always something to consume? The mind gets trained to chase stimulation instead of clarity. It starts to measure time not in meaning, but in hits of novelty.
But here’s the cost: if you can’t stay with something, you can’t understand it. You can’t process it. You can’t metabolize experience if you keep jumping away from it. This is how we end up with unresolved trauma, half-built identities, shallow relationships, and a culture that can’t hold nuance for more than a few seconds. People don’t finish thoughts. They don’t finish conflicts. They don’t finish the emotional arc of anything. They just skip to the next thing and wonder why they feel fragmented.
Attention isn’t just about focus. It’s about anchoring. If you can’t anchor your attention to something real and stay with it—especially when it’s uncomfortable—then your inner world becomes unmoored. You start reacting instead of reflecting. You speak before you understand. You judge before you’ve thought. And over time, that becomes your default. You move through life in a constant state of exit. You never settle into anything long enough to let it shape you.
This doesn’t just affect individuals. It affects how we live together. Democracy requires patience. Dialogue requires discomfort. Intimacy requires emotional stamina. You cannot build a shared world with people who can’t sit through a pause, a disagreement, or a moment of ambiguity. We are losing our tolerance for process. And when process disappears, only reaction remains. That’s where polarization grows. That’s where empathy dies. That’s where everything collapses into performance and speed.
Even beauty is impacted. To really take in a piece of music, or a poem, or a view, or someone’s face—you have to stay. You have to give it time. Not everything reveals itself in the first few seconds. Sometimes the most meaningful things are the ones that unfold slowly, after you’ve been willing to sit through the part that feels empty. But most people never get there. They move on before it can even begin.
Some will say this is just how things are now. That people are busier, that attention is naturally shrinking, that we have to adapt. But adaptation isn’t always growth. Sometimes adaptation is collapse. And this is collapse. Because the human mind was not designed for endless skipping. The heart was not designed for constant interruption. The self was not built to live in fifteen-second segments.
So what do we do with this?
We stop normalizing it. We stop laughing it off like it’s harmless. We stop pretending like emotional impatience is a personality trait instead of a trained deficit. And we start retraining the mind to stay. Not forever. Just longer than we’ve been taught to. We let the moment breathe. We sit with the silence. We stay with the feeling. We don’t fix the discomfort—we feel it. We don’t outrun the boredom—we ask what it’s pointing to. We stay. We stay. We stay.
Because the ability to stay is the beginning of depth. And without depth, nothing holds.