The Attention-Span Panic
NEWS | 07 May 2026
Last year, I took a drastic step to protect my attention: I cut off my home internet service. I already refuse to get a smartphone and have long paid for an app to block internet access on my laptop when I need to be productive. Yet I was still wasting too many late-night hours scrolling X, or watching CGI reenactments of plane crashes and VHS rips of old Letterman episodes. Even resisting took an effort that I resented; the internet, I became convinced, was making me stupid, and I had no one to blame but myself. Attention, these days, is something that many Americans seem to regard as an inherent virtue whose purity they can try to protect or allow to be despoiled. A diminished attention span is a sign of personal weakness, or even intellectual debasement. On social media, people talk of having “German-shepherd attention spans” and liken their condition to “brain damage.” To reduce one’s attention span, so the logic implies, is to reduce one’s humanity. But this might be an outdated way of thinking about attention—and one that blames the individual for dispensing something that, more accurately, is being extracted. Some of the most lucrative companies on the planet, after all, are those that harvest attention. Perhaps many people feel bad about their attention span not because it’s too short, but because they sense that they’re running themselves ragged by giving away a precious commodity for far less than it’s worth. According to neurologists, humans have many types of attention. “Serial” attention, for instance, might be used to monitor gadgets as they move past on a factory assembly line, whereas the ability to focus on a face while ignoring noise around it is “spatial” attention. Today’s laments about deteriorating focus, though, generally refer to “sustained” attention, which is when one homes in on a single item for a long period. And people are faced with so many distractions that their capacity to singularly focus does seem to be undergoing a fundamental change, Tony Ro, a neuroscience professor at CUNY, told me. In 2007—the same year the first iPhone was released—the scholar N. Katherine Hayles, then an English professor at UCLA (where she’s now a research professor), called this transition a shift from “deep attention,” which is extended focus on, say, a novel, to “hyper attention,” a type characterized by “switching focus rapidly among different tasks and information streams.” Along with this shift came judgment; Hayles wrote that hyper-attention was “regarded as defective behavior that scarcely qualifies as a cognitive mode at all.” Read: I see your smartphone-addicted life A great irony of this contemporary insecurity about attention is that, compared with the rest of the animal kingdom, the human attention span is really not that impressive. Although we have many exceptional cognitive abilities (abstract thought, for instance), Raymond Klein, an experimental psychologist at Dalhousie University, told me that a house cat staring at a mouse hole can marshal much more impressive attentional resources than the average person. Even the relatively paltry sustained-attention span of modern humans is a recent innovation. Primitive foragers needed a limber form of attention that could constantly monitor for threats. Only when humans settled did it become more beneficial to dedicate focus to crops, to looms and fences, to reruns of The Price Is Right. But hyper-attention, especially the sort demanded of modern humans, comes with astronomically high costs. Concentrating uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, and whether one is steadily focused on a single thing or rapidly shifting among focal points, both forms of attention draw from the same figurative fuel tank (a tank that, it’s worth noting, can vary by person, depending on genetic or environmental factors). When that fuel runs out, so does one’s capacity to lock in. And like a car that stops and starts every couple of blocks versus one that cruises down the highway, shifting our attention among different things uses up far more energy than steadily focusing on one. Not only are people constantly bombarded by news updates, Slack messages about deliverables, and whimsical memes, but their brains have also defaulted to operating in the most inefficient mode. Read: The film students who can no longer sit through films Trying to push through results only in a crash. In the early days of factory work, employees had to stand at assembly lines for hours at a time, focusing on repetitive tasks and moving at a merciless pace. As physically strenuous as the work could be, it was even more punishing mentally. In Behemoth, Joshua B. Freeman’s history of the factory, he writes that workers called the state of fatigued, overtaxed attention “Forditis.” The wives of Ford workers complained that they came home in a bad mood and went straight to bed—and that Forditis even made their husbands impotent. Switch out the assembly line for screens and social media, and Forditis seems like a fairly good analogy for today’s ailment: brains that are drained, unable to make room for much else. Still, mere exhaustion doesn’t quite account for the panic about attention. When people complain about “attention-seeking behavior” in others, after all, it’s because they feel like something valuable is being taken. And although nobody is forced to watch TikTok, many seem to feel that their attention is being stolen from them. In a way, it is. Tech companies have turned attention into a moneymaking commodity, and yet most of the scrolling masses are unable to cash in on even a fraction of the value generated by their very own eyeballs. In the regular economy, Americans put their labor or goods on the free market, and in exchange, they receive money to spend on rent, food, gray-market peptides, jeans with sequined butterflies on the back pockets, etc. In the attention economy, people don’t really sell their commodity—their attention; they simply give it away or barter it in return for … what? Photos of a co-worker’s breakfast? Cat videos? According to one behavioral study released last year, the median American adult spends a little more than six hours a day looking at a smartphone, and many spend five hours on social-media apps alone, which essentially amounts to clocking in to a part-time job—though plenty of people are likely being paid only in amusement, envy, stoked outrage, or a sort of anaesthetized daze that’s not quite boredom but not quite not-boredom either. Read: The new age of performance anxiety When everyone’s too tired and atomized from looking at their phone to assess their place in the attention economy, it’s easier to resort to self-recrimination, to make a resolution to reclaim one’s focus, to cultivate one’s own mindfulness. (Or, in my case, to hoard attention like a cranky prospector in a mountain shack.) The desire to escape the attention economy has simply opened more pathways for attention capture. While TikTok fine-tunes its algorithm for maximum addictiveness, start-ups sell meditation apps and brain supplements. Perhaps the best metaphor for the contemporary attention span is the factory-farmed dairy cow: shot up with hormones on the one hand, milked mercilessly on the other. The attention economy’s subsumption of the conventional economy happened so rapidly that many people may only just now be realizing that they’re being farmed. As late as 2013, the largest company in the world was the fossil-fuel giant ExxonMobil; just a few years later, it was Alphabet. Great wealth is often acquired by such sleights of hand. The farm containing the first oil well in the U.S. was bought for only $5,000, and the island of Manhattan was, as legend has it, exchanged for glass beads and trinkets. But these fleecings tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth. Is it any wonder that so many people are so anxious, so restless, so frustrated about attention these days? The queasiness one feels after a fleeting hour of scrolling could be from a sense of soiled virtue, from mental exhaustion, or from a much more American consternation: the awareness, even if only subconscious, of having sold oneself cheap.
Author: Franklin Schneider.
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