Start the Timer

Can I have your attention for the next two and half minutes?

If so, you'll make your ancestors of the early 21st century proud.

According to Dr. Gloria Mark of the University of California Irvine, the average American's attention span on a single screen has dropped from two minutes and 30 seconds to a mere 47 seconds in the past 20 years. That's nearly a 75% reduction over the span of two decades.

The future of focus doesn't look any brighter.

TikTok, the popular video streaming platform, has seen an enormous increase in user engagement over the past seven years. In 2019, the average TikTok user was spending just 27 minutes a day on the application. In 2026, that number has jumped to over an hour and a half of daily use.

The average watch time for a TikTok video is between 14-17 seconds; the decision to watch the video is made within the first three seconds.

In other words: If I'm not intrigued, amused, or horrified by the time I count "Three Mississippi's", I'm out of here.

Perhaps you've felt the ramifications of a deteriorated attention span in your own life. Maybe you have a hard time staying on task at work or school. Or it could be that you feel that compulsive need to pull out your phone every time you sense an inkling of boredom.

(You might even be starting to sense that inkling right about now. But stay with me!)

While I think we can all agree that an incessant need to be entertained is a problematic aspect of the current human condition- I worry the situation is far more dire than we realize.

Because it's only going to get worse.

The social media giants of the world have no desire for their users to regain an ability to focus. After all, their entire revenue stream is dependent on active engagement from users to generate advertising demand and sell data. The last thing they want to see you do is delete their applications so you can get back to reading books.

The U.S. government shows no signs of corrective action either. Ample opportunities have presented themselves for the complete eradication of TikTok on account of its utilization as a Chinese spyware product, and yet the app's user-base continues to grow in the United States. I recognize that the removal of a single social media platform is like removing a single snowball on a snow-covered mountain of mindless internet activity. Even so, it would at least offer some indication that our congressional leaders aren't completely indifferent to our social media habits. The argument could be made that the government is actually in favor of additional screen time for its constituents so that they spend more time lost in the internet and less time holding elected officials accountable.

And then there are the corporate giants of a global economy. Social media is feeding them consumer data with a level of detail and precision that the world has never before seen. We've arrived at a place where we mention products or places in conversations with our friends, and suddenly those products and places appear in advertisements on our phones.

Before the Patriot Act, we would have only expected this from a dystopian novel set long into the future.

Now it's just the "New Normal".

These entities who possess the most power to reverse the course of our dwindling attention spans have no reason to advocate for that change. And thus, I suspect the current trends will continue.

And as much as I would like to blame the powers that be for the downfall of intellectually engaged civilization, I'll share this instead-

Dr. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and holocaust survivor, offered the following counsel:

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Dr. Viktor Frankl, The Jewish Journal

Social media, pornography, and countless other internet entertainment opportunities are rapidly removing and numbing any sort of tension we may feel in our minds. There is no need to strive for greater purpose when "good enough" pleasure is waiting for us in our pockets at any time.

But for those who realize this, I suspect there's a grand opportunity:

While the world at large slowly withers away into entertainment oblivion, perhaps there will be less competition in your way on the road to accomplishing a "worthy goal". Maybe the slow downfall of attention spans and critical thinking is nothing more than a door opening for those who want to go another direction.

So I'll leave you with this:

Which direction are you headed now? And which way do you want to go?