Fix Your Attention Span (I'm Living Like It's 2004)

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Hey, I just subbed a fifth grade class, and as someone with a lot of experience in the classroom and a lot of experience in reading, I just want you to know we should be really afraid about the future of our society.

[00:00:09]Do you know that every single kid thinks they're going to be a content creator, and when you ask them what their hobbies are, it's all video game and addictive things that they think are hobbies.

[00:00:17]Hobbies are not that. Hobbies are not addictive things. Hobbies are the things that brought you joy before you were five or six years old. So, maybe it was soccer, maybe it was animals, maybe it was going outside, but these kids don't know those things about themselves.

[00:00:28]Quite frankly, I don't even think they know when they have to go to the bathroom. I don't even think they know when they're hungry. They just want to get back onto their devices ASAP.

[00:00:36]>> I know we all love to smugly watch the TikToks of parents and teachers sounding the alarm about how bad attention spans are in the Zoomers and Alphas. But, before you pat yourself on the back too hard, let me ask you, you ever try to read a book lately? Like a classic or an award-winner? Not your favorite genre read. No judgement, but, you know, it's different. How long does it take you before you start skimming? Okay. Now, how long does it take you before you reach for your phone? I tried this myself a few weeks ago, diving into a literary novel that I've had on my shelf for years. Uh specifically, As Meat Loves Salt. Not my usual thriller fare, but it was well-written and uh filled with the kind of deep meaning that I love in books.

[00:01:17]Or at least I used to.

[00:01:19]>> [sighs] >> I made it five pages before my hand was on my phone.

[00:01:24]I don't even remember deciding to pick it up. The hand just went. And then I got pissed because not only am I a writer, I'm an editor. It's my job to read people's books, to internalize them, and tell the author how to improve them, and why. Not just my subjective did I like it or did I not.

[00:01:46]Reading is my job.

[00:01:48]It's also the thing that I love most in the world, and if I can't do that anymore, that's a problem, right?

[00:01:55]So, that's my specific boggle.

[00:01:59]Even if writing isn't your job or even something you aspire to do, chances are you've noticed your own attention span circling the drain.

[00:02:09]Yeah, it's it's better than those nightmare cases like you saw in the video clip at the beginning, but is is that where we're setting the bar here?

[00:02:16]Like I mentioned in my last video, I started project 2004 to go back in time as best I can, specifically to a time where things worked. They just worked.

[00:02:27]This is going to be the first dedicated video in that series, and the question we're asking today is when exactly did our attention spans break?

[00:02:37]And what are we going to do about it?

[00:02:40]2004 might seem a little late in the game to use as an exemplar for attention spans. After all, the internet was in almost every home by then. People watched TV and movies with nearly every bit of their spare time, and reading was already in the decline. I mean, that's not a new thing. But it wasn't nearly as bad then as it is now. Books were still selling. People still liked to read just for fun, not performatively.

[00:03:06]And we have the numbers to prove that, actually. In 2004, a researcher at UC Irvine named Gloria Mark, I think she studied computers and how they're used as just as her job. In this study, she measured how long the average person could stay focused on a single screen before switching to another one. This is before smartphones, by the way.

[00:03:27]The answer was 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

[00:03:30]She did the same study in 2012. The number then was 75 seconds, cut in half in 8 years. And then she did it again in 2024.

[00:03:41]47 seconds.

[00:03:44]>> [laughter] >> Oh my god. The knee-jerk reaction is to think that we're just all collectively getting dumber. But I I don't know if you'll feel better about this, but that's not actually what's happening.

[00:03:53]It's the environment that's changed.

[00:03:55]Your brain has just adapted to the new environment. Okay, what was actually different about 2004? I found out in my comments section last week that I actually do have some youngins in the audience. So, for you, >> [laughter] >> let auntie paint a picture for you. For starters, in 2004, the only social media I had was Facebook. And Facebook in 2004 was college students only.

[00:04:21]You needed to have a.edu email address to sign up. That was the whole rule.

[00:04:26]MySpace was a big one, okay? It was there, but I never had one. It was It was too busy. It was too loud. What do you mean when I click on your profile, I'm greeted by Good Charlotte blasting my ears out on a loop? No, hell on earth. No, thank you.

[00:04:41]No, thank you to all of that. But those who were on MySpace were in the same general situation that I was in.

[00:04:48]Our friends list was composed of people we actually knew. For me, it was my classmates, all of whom I saw on campus and at local bars and around town. Uh buddies from the Marine Corps who'd gone on to college on the GI Bill. Um some high school friends and sometimes friends of friends that I'd met in the comments section. That was the entire universe of Facebook for me and for most everybody else as well.

[00:05:10]Which is why I posted true things.

[00:05:13]>> [laughter] >> Personal things. Random observations from my day. I had this whole running series about the shenanigans of the of my redneck neighbors. They were awful.

[00:05:24]They were so awful. Their kids literally threw dog shit at each other like like a snowball fight, but disgusting. Uh there there was no goal to logging on to Facebook except to see what my friends were up to and if anything cool was going down in Emporia that week. Um I wasn't trying to grow a following and neither was anybody else. I wasn't building a brand. I told my friends about the funny stuff in my life because it was funny and they were my friends.

[00:05:50]But also there was no algorithm at that time. There were no metrics. Nobody would screenshot me and put it on a different platform and get me fired.

[00:06:00]Mostly because everybody had their own not suitable for work binge drinking photos on Facebook and knew better than to throw stones.

[00:06:09]The whole experience was real people that I knew doing real things in real life. And we were all together talking about it and taking pictures of it for those who had a digital camera. That's not what Facebook is now. Matt Walsh had a great video where he speculates that when Facebook became an algorithm driven site in 2009 and then all the rest of the sites followed it, that was the turning point in our society rather than the existence of social media itself. I have to agree. Um most of everyone's feed now includes strangers, many of whom we don't even follow because we no longer decide what we want to see. The tech companies decide for us. Everything that was good about social media in 2004 is the thing that got taken out of social media after 2009. For example two, TV was finite. I didn't have cable in 2004 uh because I was broke. I was a college student. Um so I had network television, the free kind. Rabbit ears on top of the TV. They were so ugly you guys. They were so ugly.

[00:07:09]>> [laughter] >> Network TV had a schedule. Things came on at specific times. There was no scrolling. If you missed a show, you just missed it because I also uh didn't have TiVo. I think TiVo existed, but I didn't have one.

[00:07:24]My afternoon schedule was Dr. Phil at 3:00. I was done with classes at that point and then Oprah right after. And yes, I accept I accept your scorn.

[00:07:34]Uh but until 3:00 my only option was soap operas which were then and are now an abomination. So an episode of Dr. Phil while eating a Wendy's chicken sandwich felt like a gift.

[00:07:48]At night, I watched the network dramas.

[00:07:50]House MD was a big one for me. It premiered that year. I loved it. Lost was another one. Um but the thing is, I didn't have a show [snorts] to watch every night. It was not 5 days a week. It certainly wasn't 7 days a week.

[00:08:03]Weekends were a wasteland for TV. When nothing was on that I wanted to watch, I could put in a DVD or VHS from my collection. And if I didn't want to do that either, I turned the TV off and maybe checked out the internet. There were a lot of forums back then and I was active on exactly one.

[00:08:23]The IMDb message boards, may they rest in peace.

[00:08:26]The IMDb boards were where you went to talk about TV shows or movies that you liked with other people who liked the same stuff. Every Thursday night, a new episode of CSI would air.

[00:08:37]After it ended, you'd go on to IMDb or maybe even while it was airing with whatever username you wanted. No ID verification needed. And you jump into the thread of that night's episode.

[00:08:48]Maybe 40, 50, sometimes 100 people all talking about that episode. And we would have to like chastise people on the East Coast like, "No spoilers, you pack of bastards." You know, things like that cuz we were in different time zones.

[00:09:01]So, we would talk about what happened and what we thought.

[00:09:03]And then sometimes what we predicted would happen next week. Or sometimes we were asking what that song was that played in the opening credits. There were no ads in the thread. No algorithm rearranging the comments, no engagement bait, and no >> [laughter] >> no moderation. Which honestly sometimes was a problem. I'm pretty sure that's why they did away with them. Or at least that's the reason they gave. Disney, may they live in infamy, bought IMDb and killed the boards. Not only because they were a moderation liability. Apparently, there was, you know, death threats or whatever, but also because they didn't generate ad revenue.

[00:09:42]Can't have that. That's basically the whole story of what happened to the internet between 2004 and now.

[00:09:48]The places where humans talked to humans about things they cared about got killed because they weren't profitable enough. The places that replaced them are the algorithmic feeds where some heifer from Amarillo is trying to sell you a shower mop as if you can hold a candle to the great Joe Mangano. Get the off my feed. The threat when you look at these three examples, the thing that they all have in common, they were finite. You could finish them. You could be done. They were intentional.

[00:10:20]You decided to go to them. They didn't push themselves on you. They were single purpose. The TV did TV stuff. The forum did forum stuff, which was conversations, and Facebook did Facebook stuff, conversations but also announcements and just general socializing. They didn't all blend into one infinite scroll where work emails and political outrage Stop putting political shit on LinkedIn. Oh my god.

[00:10:44]And your cousin's wedding photos and a deodorant ad flowed past you in random order.

[00:10:50]Oh, and to the companies who sell hygiene items for women, stop showing me gross images just to get me to stop scrolling. I don't want to see chotch hair sticking out of a bathing suit because you want to sell me a razor. I'm trying to eat my chicken salad sandwich and have a blessed day, and you show me that? Disgusting. Shame on you. The part that should piss you off is the part that you already know. The algorithms aren't trying to make you happy or inform you or help connect you with old friends or even new friends. You know, the original premise of social media.

[00:11:24]They're explicitly engineered to maximize the amount of time you spend on the app. That's how the company makes money. Your attention is the product they sell to advertisers. You are the product. Something the companies are all pretty open about. Their quarterly earnings report list time spent on platform as their key performance metric. They want you on the app longer.

[00:11:49]Which is why they killed external links.

[00:11:50]They have armies of behavioral psychologists figuring out how to keep you there. Jonathan Haidt did a really great series on that. They have billions of dollars of research budgets dedicated to keep you scrolling. You know, kind of like a slot machine. Funny thing is, the same people who built these systems, and you've probably heard this, uh, send their own kids to phone-free schools.

[00:12:13]Steve Jobs didn't let his kids touch iPads. Bill Gates didn't let his kids have phones until they were teenagers. And tech executives in Silicon Valley, and everywhere else, send their kids to Waldorf schools where screens are banned until eighth grade.

[00:12:31]They know.

[00:12:32]Okay? They know what they're doing to us. Meanwhile, out here, amongst the plebs, the great unwashed, the average person checks their phone 96 times a day.

[00:12:45]Which works out to once every 10 minutes during waking hours. They have 228 separate phone sessions per day, 10 seconds each on average, and it takes the brain 25 minutes to fully refocus after a single interruption. So, if you're one of those people who can't understand why nobody likes phone calls anymore, this is why.

[00:13:05]Because it takes a long time to refocus.

[00:13:07]The spooky thing, is just having your phone on your desk, face down, even on silent, measurably reduces your working memory and your ability to solve problems. If you're a writer, this is a professional death. If you're anyone else who wants to have a coherent thought in their head, it's the same problem just with smaller consequences.

[00:13:29]In case you are one of my younger viewers, you might be asking yourself why any of this is a problem. Teachers have stated that their kids frequently pop off to them about how they don't need to do math or sit still or read in a book. AI will do everything for them and all this is a waste of time. And we all remember the video of the young man asking his classmates to read a simple sentence and most of them couldn't.

[00:13:56]Many thinking that it was funny. The kids think that the need to focus your attention is a quirky habit of the older generation, some weird boomer obsession, like drinking out of a fire ho- no, not a fire hose. Like drinking out of a garden hose on a hot day or writing in cursive or balancing a checkbook by hand. The kids aren't wrong that those things are old, okay? And and we do get a little silly when it comes to the nostalgia. But they're wrong that the attention is the same kind of thing.

[00:14:24]Attention is not a preference. It's not obsolete. It's the underlying capacity that makes every other capacity possible. First reason, you can't do hard things without it. Every skill worth having takes sustained attention to learn. Every single one. Even if it's, you know, your your treasured hobby, like the the Warcraft miniatures that y'all do.

[00:14:49]You have to be able to pay attention for that. Writing a novel for instance, like a lot of my audience. Building a business, like the nonfiction part of my audience. Becoming a surgeon, if any of you are actually skilled enough to do that.

[00:15:03]Learning to play guitar, for the musician folks. Raising a kid who isn't a disaster.

[00:15:10]Looking at you, gentle parenting millennials. May you roast in hell. The person who can sit with a hard problem for 2 hours has an advantage over the person who can sit with it for 47 seconds.

[00:15:23]And that advantage is not close. This argument is even more important in 2026 than it was in 2004 because AI is now competent at every shallow task.

[00:15:34]The work that's left for humans is the work that requires sustained, original, attentive thinking.

[00:15:41]The teenagers being told they don't need attention are being trained out of the only economically valuable skill they'll have access to in 15 years. The second reason Bro, you can't love anyone without attention. Yeah, I I said that.

[00:15:56]The dating crisis you hear about constantly, how nobody can find a partner, nobody can stay in a relationship, nobody can raise children together. That's the same problem as the attention crisis. It's just dressed up in different language. People literally can't focus on another human being for long enough to form a bond. Try telling your wife about your day for 10 minutes while she checks her phone every 47 seconds. Try listening to a friend describe a problem without your hand drifting towards your pocket. Try parenting a child while you scroll.

[00:16:26]We've all seen that, haven't we?

[00:16:28]The marriage problem, the parenting problem, the friendship problem. Oh, sorry, I'm going to bail. I got a case of the innies.

[00:16:35]Bitch.

[00:16:36]Uh, they're all the same problem.

[00:16:38]You can't know another person if you can't sustain attention on them.

[00:16:43]And also a friend telling you about something serious isn't trauma dumping.

[00:16:46]What the hell is wrong with you? Third reason, and and this is a big one. You can't hear yourself without it. There's a line from Pascal in the 17th century.

[00:16:55]He said that all of human misery comes from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He was diagnosing aristocrats with too much wine and not enough purpose.

[00:17:05]And I hate to tell you this, but even if you're dead broke, your life right now is better than even the richest aristocrat of that time.

[00:17:13]True story.

[00:17:14]The diagnosis this uh pretty cleanly to every asshole in 2026 with a phone.

[00:17:21]If you can't tolerate silence, you can't hear your own thoughts.

[00:17:25]You only hear whatever the algorithm queued up for you.

[00:17:29]That's how you become an NPC, uncritically ingesting every fool thing Sam Altman's monster tells you.

[00:17:37]Your inner life is being lived by a piece of software that does not have your best interests at heart and frankly isn't capable of having interests at all. You feel things you didn't choose to feel.

[00:17:48]You want things you didn't choose to want. Are you trying to tell me that anyone looked at a fucking Labubu and said, "Yes, I must have that."

[00:17:58]No.

[00:17:59]They were told they were prized and coveted and they were running out. You have to move now.

[00:18:05]And they did move. They all bought ugly garbage because voice in box said so.

[00:18:10]That condition has a name and it's called being a consumer with two Os. That's the answer to the kids on TikTok. The reason they think attention is an old world skill is the same reason a person who has never been outside their own house would say going outside is old-fashioned.

[00:18:27]They've never been there.

[00:18:29]They don't know what they're missing and the people telling them they don't need it are the people getting rich off the fact that they don't have it. So, we've laid out the problem. What exactly am I going to do about it and what can any of us really do about it? Uh for starters, social media comes off the phone.

[00:18:50]All of it. Even Substack.

[00:18:53]Now, I run businesses and I need to let people know that I am ready to offer editing and ghostwriting services if they send in an inquiry through YouTube or through email or whatever. Slots open for June and July, by the way. Uh obviously, I have a YouTube channel and I have my articles over on kristenmacteeran.com. I need to respond to comments in a timely fashion.

[00:19:14]So, I can't fully unplug from social media. But, I can change the access pattern.

[00:19:20]So, my rule is simple. There's no social media apps on my phone at all. And no using the phone browser for social media, period. Smack your hand.

[00:19:32]If I want to check Twitter, I have to sit at my computer, open the browser, type in the URL, and log in. If I want to check Facebook, same thing.

[00:19:42]The phone is thus restored to the function it had in 2004. It's a phone.

[00:19:48]What I expect to happen, my phone check frequency, which is currently embarrassing, uh will drop a lot. I still have email on my phone, to be clear, like the Blackberries of old, so I can stay on top of things. Uh but, I only triage email once a day. Uh and I don't take phone calls from clients.

[00:20:06]Because if you're not savvy enough to operate email, uh you probably can't operate track changes in a Word document, either.

[00:20:13]Uh we'll see if I can get my screen time under 2 hours. That would be a good start.

[00:20:19]Experiment two, uh specific spaces for specific tasks. So, in 2004, the architecture of your day enforced attention, because each activity had a physical location. The TV was in the living room. Maybe some millennials with permissive parents got a TV in their own room, but I didn't. And when I was in college, I I couldn't afford two TVs. Uh likewise, the one computer was in the office. Laptops existed, uh but then as now, they were much more expensive than desktops. So, I had a desktop. And though I did have a cell phone in 2004, it wasn't a smartphone.

[00:20:54]And when I wasn't out of the house, it lived in the office, plugged in. I did not watch TV in bed. I did not work from the couch. I certainly did not look at or think about social media while eating dinner.

[00:21:08]The space, the physical space you were in, told your brain what to do.

[00:21:13]Now, the phone tells you to do everything, everywhere, all at once.

[00:21:18]Which is the same as telling you not to do anything well. I am rebuilding the architecture.

[00:21:23]Reading will be done in bed on an actual book, not scrolling or watching TV. My desk, where I sit at this very moment, is for work.

[00:21:34]The TV in the living room is for DVDs.

[00:21:38]The bedroom is a no phone zone, full stop. The phone lives on the kitchen counter unless I'm actively using it.

[00:21:46]The point is to not put all of the burden on my willpower. It is to make the right thing easy to do and the wrong thing slightly, if not overtly, inconvenient.

[00:21:59]In 2004, the wrong thing was very inconvenient by default because the devices were physically separated from each other. You had to carry like four devices if you wanted to take a picture and talk on the phone and was the Kindle out by then? I'm not sure, maybe. Um but yeah, all separate devices.

[00:22:16]And I'm recreating that. Experiment three is making everything finite.

[00:22:22]Weirdly, this is the one I'm most excited about.

[00:22:25]Uh everything in my media diet is going to have an end, no infinite scroll.

[00:22:29]>> [snorts] >> For social contact, I'm I'm focusing on the people that I actually care about.

[00:22:33]So, these are real friends, family, close colleagues, um the following feed on Twitter and Substack. And honestly, my presence is so small on Facebook that um everybody that I'm friends with, like I know them anyway. There's no strangers on on Facebook for me. I I nuked my original Facebook account sometime around 2016. Uh so, the one I have now is pretty sanitized. I don't really consider YouTube social media. You may disagree, but I did build a TV guide for my subscriptions, all of the all of the channels that I subscribe to here on YouTube, uh where each night of the week I watch new content from the channels that I follow. So, I'm not going to be scrolling the recommended feed because I have enough to watch as it is.

[00:23:16]I don't need mindless, repetitive slop.

[00:23:19]The rule across all of these is the same. When a thing is finished, you stop. You don't refresh. You don't scroll. You don't open another tab. You multiple tab people on the browser, y'all stress me out. How do you live?

[00:23:32]When you're done, you go read. You go to bed early. You do whatever a person did in 2004 when the entertainment for the night had run out.

[00:23:39]We're in the summer right now, so the sun sets later. Maybe you could go on a walk. It's still light at 8:00 p.m. Yay.

[00:23:46]Now, before I wrap things up, I want to drive home that this is not a productivity hack. I'm not trying to help you 10x your output so you can be a better cog in somebody else's machine.

[00:23:57]The point of getting your attention back is not that you'll work harder. The point is that you'll be able to think your own thoughts again. If you're my age or thereabouts, I know you used to be able to sit in a chair and read a book for 2 hours, and that was a normal Tuesday.

[00:24:13]You used to be able to have a conversation with your crush or your friend for an hour or two or three without checking your pocket or feeling like you were missing something.

[00:24:23]The world is different now, and there's a lot of things we can't get back.

[00:24:27]But this is one thing we can.

[00:24:29]You don't have to move to the woods or quit your job or go to one of those retreats with no Wi-Fi.

[00:24:36]You just have to change a few defaults and pay attention to what changes.

[00:24:41]This is just the first video for Project 2004, and I'll be doing more for the next few months.

[00:24:47]Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And if you want to read companion articles for Project 2004, you should subscribe over on kristenmctiernan.com.

[00:24:57]So, that's all I have for this week. Until next time, take care, and write well.