Maybe it's because, as a post next to this on HN tells me, attentions are off by one?
Have attention spans been declining?
151–160 of 495 posts
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#152I feel increasing frustration every time I see a graph with a clear upward trend being waved off as "probably just better awareness". I am even more frustrated when it's a graph tracking some mental health issue. If adult ADHD numbers have doubled, that should mean something .
That's all well and good, but it's a plain ol' fact that it could all be from increased awareness. If someone is saying "no, it's too significant a change to be just awareness," it's kind of a nothing statement.
What's the point of bringing awareness to undiagnosed mental health issues if we brush off signs that it helps people get diagnosed as a WORSENING of mental health?
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#153People hack themselves to find the quickest release of feel-good chemicals in their brain but most do it at the expense of not realizing that it numbs their entire existence. And now it’s more prevalent than it ever has been. Grabbing a phone is a nice way to stay in the shell that you have built around yourself and pretend like you have control over your life, but no one has control over their lives. The more you bu…
> The more you build walls of ideas around yourself the easier it becomes to make you discombobulated with the slightest gust of wind. Resilience can be cultivated with practice. The more you enter caves you don't want to enter, the more treasure you find.
Exactly. And sometimes you will enter a cave that is so full of terror it might knock you out for a while, but there are two things to this:
1) you actually made it that far. Life doesn’t treat you like shit when you are trying, it simply ups the ante and then you see how far you can go.
2) you now have an opportunity to learn from yourself. How did you end up in this place and how bad was it really? How would you feel about going back and how would you approach the situation this time?
And the treasure you find is wisdom that you can then pass onto other people, particularly those close to you.
I have been fortunate to meet people who have had a lot of experience with this but I consider myself an absolute apprentice even if I have dared to take a few big leaps.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#154I'd guess that the shocking "Yes, 65%" in the HN title is what catapulted it into the #1 front page spot -- but that bit isn't currently in the title on TFA (nor in the 2 archive.org captures).
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#155I went to a theater to watch Mission: Impossible last night. It has a really long runtime (2h 48m) and, toward the end of the film, I started seeing multiple people pull out their phones for a time check; I had to stop myself from doing the same.
New movies are just long for no reason. I feel like 1.5hr was typical before. Longer ones like Star Wars 5 and Lawrence of Arabia were worth, but now everything is 2h at least. Marvel movies are the worst offenders, often 3hr with maybe a decent plot the first hour followed by filler action.
Also, somehow the art of making dialog audible was lost in the 2010s, to the point where everyone uses subtitles at home now.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#156People hack themselves to find the quickest release of feel-good chemicals in their brain but most do it at the expense of not realizing that it numbs their entire existence. And now it’s more prevalent than it ever has been. Grabbing a phone is a nice way to stay in the shell that you have built around yourself and pretend like you have control over your life, but no one has control over their lives. The more you bu…
>> Grabbing a phone is a nice way to stay in the shell that you have built around yourself and pretend like you have control over your life, but no one has control over their lives. Probably a major cause of the increased levels of anxiety younger generations have. Simple things like blocking out the world with headphones, or standing in line engrossed in your phone reduce the likelihood of somebody interacting with…
And the problem is that the more closed you become, the more amplified are your experiences which you deem hostile.
A member in my family is like this and I try to leave her alone for the most part, but there are opportunities where I try to remind her that no one is out there to get you.
Just do nice/good things for yourself and the rest will present itself.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this says more about the quality of the movie than it does people's attention spans. A movie that doesn't keep you sucked in until the end is just a bad movie.
Look at Avatar (2009) vs the sequel. The original was ~3 hours long, and a pretty ok movie. Kept the attention of everyone in my family from beginning to end. The sequel was 15 minutes longer, but we gave up before the end of the first hour because it was atrocious, particularly the paper-thin "dude, bro" writing.
Avatar 2009 had cutting-edge visuals, but by the 1.5hr mark I was bored. I don't remember the ending, might've walked out.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recipe tiktoks are like 30 seconds long - faster to watch the whole thing than scrolling to find the recipe on a bloated blogspam recipe site.
I see recipes Tiktoks get readily debunked in longer-form content, such as by channels like "How To Cook That"¹; the Tiktoks amount to little more than content farming. What real information might be present is drowned out by fakes and bad advice that exist for no other reason than to soak up eyeballs. I get far more out of longer-form videos, IMO. (And yes, the bloated recipe blogspam is also a form that is rapidly…
Most longer form videos about food are half filler, mostly to appease youtube ads.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway either. The first print run of Sun Also Rises was 5000 copies. Most people didn't read much and a significant proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tec…
Hemingway was never JK Rowling, but he wasn't an obscure writer known only to academics and literature aficionados either. Your print run figure undersells his popularity quite a bit. "The Sun Also Rises" was his first novel when he was an unknown. Wikipedia goes on to say that it was on its 8th printing two years after publication.[0] This says that it had sold a million copies by 1961 [1]. The first edition of "For…
Hemingway was probably the best-known of the ex-pat Paris crowd during his lifetime. I expect some the Algonquin Roundtable writers may have been at least as equally well-known though as many wrote for popular magazines. Dorothy Parker's first volume of poetry sold 47,000 copies. [1]
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#160I listened to this podcast over the weekend on NPR's "How I Build This" (tho it's from early to mid 2022). It's an interview with Johann Hari, the author of "Stolen Focus". The book sounds like it's worth a go, even at close to 400 pages!??!?
https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-hib...