Sliding into the abyss

My attention span is slipping. I can feel it. And my working memory. I can't hold a thought in my head for as long as I used to. There are too many distractions. Too many other things to draw my mind in other directions.

There was a time when I didn't need to write anything down. I didn't need a diary. I didn't need to make a to-do list. Before we had mobile phones that saved contact details for us, I used to even remember most people's phone numbers without having to write them down.

Those days are gone, and maybe it's because I'm over 40 now. We all know that young people are like sponges; that they tend to retain information much more easily than older people. We notice this ourselves when we have older beginners coming to our classes. It generally takes more repetitions of something for it to become established in the older student's memory than it might for younger people. So maybe it's natural that my memory isn't as sharp as it used to be.

But it feels like more than just a natural progression. It feels like technology has played a large part in this cognitive deterioration. And the reason I feel like this is because I know it's not just me who is noticing these changes.

Our collective attention is being pulled in so many different ways. In fact, it is our very attention that is being sold over and over again by huge tech companies. Online advertising works so well because it is coming from people, corporations and political movements that the advertisers know we're already interested in engaging with. They have so much data on us as individuals that they can target their advertising with frightening accuracy to get us to engage with their product, service, or even ideology.

It's not in the interest of social media companies for us to have long attention spans. They need us to crave the next titbit of information, the next bit of gossip, the next photo of a  beautiful person, the next microdose of dopamine, in order for us to keep scrolling, to keep clicking, and to keep consuming. That's how they make profits in the trillions of dollars every year.

It has become a trope by now but we all know that it's true: If you're not paying for the service you're using then you, yourself are likely to be the product that's for sale. In the case of social media, it's your attention that is for sale.

The unfortunate by-product of this state of affairs, however, is that our minds are becoming conditioned to accept small parcels of unrelated information over and over again, rather than being conditioned to focus on one thing for a long time. That conditioning might take a long time to take root but it seems to me that its roots, by now, are running pretty deep.

Let's take yoga practice as an example. Unless I practise first thing in the morning, when most people are still asleep, I find it harder than I ever did to stay on my mat for the duration of the practice. If I drop my daughters to school and then come home to practise there are a hundred reasons that I'll find to cut my practice short. And yoga is something I enjoy doing! What hope do I have of completing essential tasks that I'm reluctant to do?

Of course, it's a lot easier if you're in a group with other students in a yoga class. That shared energy will, of course, keep you more focused on your practice. Unless you're really addicted you're not going to go and check your Instagram feed during the class! So it's almost like our collective attention has a multiplying factor for each individual group member's attention.

But there are so many things we need to do that take more than just a few seconds of our attention and where we don't have the help of a watchful teacher or a group of other people to keep us focused.

Made part of the remedy is to engage more and more with analogue pursuits. Spending time outdoors. Meeting real people in real life. Going to a show. Going to a class. Reading a book. AN ACTUAL BOOK THOUGH!! Or even engaging in that utterly radical pursuit of just sitting and paying attention to your breath. Can we turn the tide of our slipping attention levels by engaging in things that require our attention for longer than just a few seconds?

We have a pandemic (at least a first-world pandemic) of atrophying attention spans and I think it's a dangerous thing for our health and wellbeing. We need tools to combat this, but abstinence from technology is not a realistic solution for most of us these days. That horse has already bolted.

I don't have the answers but I feel like it's important to say that I think this is one of the big problems of our generation. What can we do to stop the slide?