Confessions Of An Attention Seeker

Please, please, please, stop scrolling.

I recently listened to an episode of Offline with Jon Favreau, titled ‘Can Democracy Survive the Attention Wars?’, it was a great listen. While it focussed on the way in which characters like Trump thrive in this current eco-system, the podcast has covered the subject of attention in a previous episode, where they spoke about the ‘attention economy’, a term which was coined in the ‘70s by psychologist and economist, Herbert A. Simon, who wrote, ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention’.

In 2025 information - and disinformation - is inescapable. Everyone seems to be struggling to focus without genuine effort. More and more my friends and I talk about how much we feel we lose from getting lost in scroll holes, and how our attention spans have depleted.

Reading is one of the things I try to prioritise as a tiny respite from constant digital immersion. It uses a different part of my brain, activating my concentration, imagination and encouraging me to properly process information. This is in contrast to the specific brand of dopamine-drenching online content consumption, which feels like putting cling film over your brain and dissociating. For a while, though, I couldn’t read as voraciously as I used to. Focus, like a muscle, can atrophy if you don’t exercise it. My ability to stay focused on long-form tasks seemed to disappear. I’ve often been told I might have ADHD, often by people with ADHD, and while I agree, I’ve started the process of diagnosis several times only to give up. Apparently, that's a pretty ADHD thing to do. Either way, neurodivergent or not, we are all fighting for the lives of our attention spans.

This year, I have created an extremely rigid routine for myself, inside the confines of which, it’s easier to accomplish what I need to do while shielding myself from distractions. Without these parameters, like a faulty pipe with a leak, my attention spills out, flowing toward the gravitational pull of newsfeeds on various platforms. The less unstructured time I have, the less I let my time run away from me. Bit of a lame segue here, but running has been another great antidote to my fracked focus. Training your physical self to breathe rhythmically, push through discomfort and dig deep to find extra reserves of energy on a long run, is not dissimilar to the mental battle of trying to escape the siren song of your social media apps calling to you from your pocket when you’re supposed to be completing a difficult task.

The problem is, it’s my job to get your attention. As I try to de-couple myself from an insatiable appetite for more, I am implored to employ the tactics of attention seeking. Social media is much more saturated than it was when I first started, there are more users, more content and therefore more competition. The more heightened, emotive, and engaging the content, the better it performs. In fact, it doesn’t even really matter whether the content is nonsensical or downright dangerous if it captures your attention. It used to be images and long captions, whereas now, after the game-changing reign of TikTok, short-form video content is king. Instagram will give you feedback on the insights of your reel, saying things like ‘this is a great hook, more people are viewing your content than usual’, or ‘this reel could be more engaging, improve the hook in the first three seconds.’ This almost gamified report is helpful, but also unnerving. Not everything is sexy or hooky or can be condensed down to be digestible within three seconds. Nor should it need to be. There are countless viral reels of people explaining how to go viral with reels, there are huge accounts making content about how to make content. We are both being trained to have the attention span of Dory, whilst also training and encouraging each other to do the same.

The more time I spend making content which I hope is going to hack the algorithm, and therefore be shown to my followers, (let alone to new people), the less time I have to really consider exactly what it is that I would love to create and share. The algorithms are ever-evolving, fickle and demanding; your audience isn’t really your audience, they see your content conditionally. And the conditions are adhering to the rules and regulations of what tickles people enough to get them to stop scrolling. As time goes on, a social media following has become valuable not only to those who are influencers and content-creators, but in all sorts of disciplines; your ability to grab attention is considered as a key metric to the likelihood of your success.

It begs the question, are we all just trying to get each other’s attention, whilst having our attention stolen, and not doing much else? It’s like we’re all Sisyphus with his boulder, only one of us is pushing it up a bit, and then someone else pushes it back down, and instead of the hell of having to push it up the hill forever, we aren’t even moving at all. The Broligarchs who run these tech companies can just sit back and enjoy the fruits of the many labourers on their sites, namely us, their users, who day after day clock on to do our shifts, haemorrhaging our attention in exchange for evanescent bursts of dopamine.

There is no shortage of content that I love to consume online, and tons of creative people and interesting voices whose work I value and enjoy — content that is educational, funny, enlightening, healing, etc. These platforms have the ability to create more of a meritocracy, to be vessels for community and education and opportunity. However, when I zoom out, and think about the time I spend on my phone, it makes me feel quite uncomfortable. I work from my phone a lot, too, so really unless I am exercising, reading, socialising or asleep, my phone is probably in my hand.

When I am anxious, or hungover, social media is like a balm, it feels as though it’s calming my nervous system, when all it’s really doing is distracting me from discomfort. I can barely go to pee without listening to a podcast. To counter this, I have purposefully been going out without my headphones so that I have to read my book when I am on a train or bus, as I won’t sink so low as to play videos out loud on public transport. However, without my noise cancelling headphones, this does mean I am then subjected to the growing number of people who do, happily, watch full TV programmes or listen to music at full volume through their phone’s speaker. We simply cannot just be. (Or talk to each other, but that’s for another Substack.) Boredom doesn’t exist anymore. I was thinking about this the other day as I sat on a train to London looking out of the window and fighting the urge to pick up my phone and check Instagram for the umpteenth time that morning. If we start to view our attention as a finite resource that we have to allocate every day, where would we choose to spend it? Inside our minds we have a whole world, we can dream and fantasise and self-soothe and create. We can work through ideas, attempt to solve problems and recall happy memories. Our brains are some of the most interesting and dynamic computers available to us and we simply refuse to enjoy them.

The other day my niece asked me to make up a story and I was alarmed at how much it felt like wading through a muddy field to produce a simple tale appropriate for a three-year-old. Eventually I bastardised Thumbelina and felt a genuine sense of dread that my child-like imagination and wonder was so out of reach. As a young girl I spent hours and hours with nothing to do except collect worms and make mud-pies, it was in those periods of inescapable boredom that my love for story-telling and creativity was born. If I want to be a writer who is any good, I really think I am going to have to be bored more often, which means sequestering my attention to my surroundings: the mundane, the slow, the IRL.

We recently discussed the rising use of AI on Everything Is Content , (a podcast where we try to digest the goings on of the world wide web as it relates to pop-culture and society at large), and how all three of us feel uncomfortable with just how many people are incorporating aids like ChatGPT into their lives. It may be helpful for productivity, but it just feels like another step down the slippery slope towards voluntarily self-lobotomising until we cannot perform any tasks without digital intervention or lubrication.

Am I an aging-out millennial, bitter about the changing tides, like those hand-wringing luddites before me who warned of the perils of technology? Must I succumb to click-bait or risk disappearing into the ether? Should I have just gotten AI to write this and worked on my book instead?

(If you enjoyed this Substack you might like my memoir: Bad Influence, Reflections on a life lived online)