The whole "younger generation bad" thing, yeah. But the specific claim of loss of attention span caused by internet / social media, no. And I think there is something there, because I don't just notice in in the younger generation, I notice it in myself. e.g. I find it very much harder to sit down and read a book than I used to.
The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees.
I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers are doing to keep students engaged and feeling motivated by what they do.
Not every one, and maybe not even majority, of our actions can be "engaging" and "motivated". When you finish the school and start working, don't expect that all work will be engaging or that someone exists in the company to motivate you. Probably nobody is engaged while doing grocery shopping or running errands. Deep work? It is _not_ fun, trust me, but often very rewarding _in the end_.
This just reeks of entitlement. “Entertain me and engage me! Let no moment of my life ever be touched by confusion or struggle! Spoon feed me everything I can ever want or need!”
Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. So if you care to have any agency and control over your own life you better figure out how to learn what you need to know, whether it’s engaging or not.
As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.
The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.
Don't worry about me. I work very hard, made it through difficult programs at top schools, made (and continue to make) significant contributions at leading companies and my compensation is probably top 0.01% in the world.
I'm familiar with hard work and struggle, having come from nothing. In fact the only thing that was handed to me was values around education and how important it is - I still believe in that deeply.
I still disagree with your framing.
Let's take this example:
> As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.
You don't see the problem here? Losing talent is not a winning strategy. If I'm a company leader, I take it as MY responsibility to create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work? There is none. Having employees that are working purely from a place of fear and not being able to pay bills is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
In short - I will bet against your version of leadership any day. I think it's anti-leadership and I would love to have you as a competitor company.
> The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.
I don't disagree with you here. We're in complete agreement. I just think this point gets over-emphasized and my original point doesn't get talked about enough - which is why I originally commented.
> Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot.
Also want to respond to this. I agree with you here as well. However I think there is a distinction between school and education. It is the environment of school that I'm talking about in particular and the way some subjects are taught (History is a pet peeve of mine. As an adult, I LOVE history and learning about history - I do it in my free time. In school, history education is fundamentally broken IMO).
> create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work?
Working towards goals that are meaningful doesn't mean that you will be entertained and engaged with fun things to do all the time. Often quite the opposite. Personal growth and bettering your life also entails doing things that may not be very engaging.
If you focus on attracting people who want to be engaged and spoon fed and will refuse to do any work that they don't find immediately rewarding, sure, I'll be happy to compete with you.
I don't know where you got the words "entertained", "fun things to do all the time", or "spoon fed" from. I didn't use any of those words and I think we actually agree that meaningful things doesn't equate to parties all the time.
When I say engaged and meaningful - I mean it in the purest sense of the words, whereas you seem to equate it to "unserious".
Back to concrete questions: Are business leaders and educators presenting problems in a way that people connect with and see the value of? Are they providing an environment that makes people want to work hard and makes them feel empowered to take on difficult challenges?
Take History education for example. I'd say the answer to the above questions are "no".
* Most students who take a History class in a typical American school don't see how memorizing dates for tests connects to anything meaningful in their life or understanding of the world.
* I'd say educators don't or can't spend much time or effort connecting the dots or presenting information in a way that inspires people to ask deeper questions.
Instead, the focus is on rote memorization in preparation for flawed standardized state tests which themselves serve as the basis for obtaining federal funding to run the school itself.
Not to mention teachers themselves are underpaid and under-resourced while the students are forced to wake up at 6am (often not getting enough sleep) to catch the bus, sit in uncomfortable chairs for 8hrs a day with no agency, and then we're surprised that they're not excited by people talking at them all day?
Put another way, let's say you show up to a restaurant that serves shitty food, has a shitty environment, and the server get your order all wrong - you pay for this with your time and money. Do you think it's reasonable for the head chef to complain that customers are ungrateful and should be happy they got food at all? If the restaurant down the street takes the care to get all these things right, are customers entitled for choosing that restaurant every time instead?
Yes, it would be really nice if every teacher could be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society or Joe Clark from Lean On Me but that just isn't the case and it isn't ever going to be the case.
Work is work and you can choose to engage yourself with it or not. Obviously, employers should not mistreat their employees, but ultimately they're all there to do whatever it is the business does and the point is to all succeed together as a business, not to nurture the personal growth of the employees.
If a server can't be bothered to make sure an order is correct the customer doesn't care whether the environment was sufficiently engaging or not, they only care about their order being right.
It's not that long ago that most people's "job" was growing enough food to survive. Nature didn't care if you found this fulfilling or engaging, you either did it or you starved. I can guarantee that if your life and your family's lives depended on growing enough potatoes to last through the winter, you'd be very interested and engaged in how to grow potatoes. It is an incredible luxury that we can even consider things like whether we feel engaged or meaning in our work.
There's meaning to be had in all honest work that serves a purpose. It's up to you to find it. If people are going to sit around and passively wait for someone to "inspire" them, they're either going to be very unsatisfied with their lives or fall prey to the first charismatic huckster that comes along. Nobody else can tell you how to find meaning in your life, you have to make it for yourself.
> The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees.
I disagree. A business isn't a summer camp or a YMCA, and while schools should obviously help a student to find their own way, it also exists to instruct without the teacher being required to act like a tik tok influencer in front of a class of 30+ students.
What with the constant infantilization of employees or students in US? My boss or my teacher aren't there to entertain me like I'm in a daycare.
I’ve heard people refer to work (half jokingly) as “adult daycare.” At face value, I dismissed it, but if you think about it from a societal perspective, it’s not completely false. Most of us are toiling away so that society keeps running. It’s like being in a fiefdom and our overlords need to supply bread & circus for our pleasure- difference being were being issued tokens to find bread & circuses on our own.
I don't think we need to think of it on the basis of blame at all, on the societal level. Individually, I think you have a better life if you have or learn conscious control of your attention. But on a large scale, if the population doesn't have immunity, it is a problem to deal with somehow. Either by "engaging" or changing the structures of institutions. But we have to have some methods of doing this, which are hard to come by when the problems are new.
The methods of engaging me employed by modern video games and fast-cut video platforms seem off-putting to me. More importantly I don't see how we can do anything meaningful when communicating like this. Life is largely search, not only exploitation of rewards.
If I was a teacher maybe I'd come up with some strategy, probably a compromise, but don't treat it as a thing they don't do just because they're lazy. It's like expecting that all people will deal with smog by designing and building their own air cleaning devices.
Hmm, we kind of did deal with smog by requiring everyone to get their own air cleaning device (catalytic converters). They didn’t have to design and build it themselves though.
My personal opinion is that this somewhat leads individuals to become entitled and less independently driven. And where does this end? People should be able to dig into things that are not always rainbows and unicorns. Inspiration is always nice though, but I don't like the idea of being spoonfed and just wrapping everything in nice shiny packages.
Sure. But there are also plenty of very necessary jobs which are not permanently engaging.
Airline pilots tend to do love aviating, but spend most of their flight standing by in case the autopilot goes awry. Most medical doctors don't have a massive catastrophe happening around them all of the time. Artisan bakers still have to knead dough.
All in all, most work generally is boring rather than fulfilling.
I think in all your examples aspects of the work may indeed be incredibly boring, but that doesn't mean it's not ultimately rewarding, fulfilling, or motivating.
At least in the case of pilots, doctors, and bakers.
One reason to at least first suspect something other than educators is that education hasn't changed all that much in a long time. As far as I can tell at least the way elementary school and high school worked when I was in them circa 1970 is the same way it had been working for at least 20 years before that and the way it continued to work for the next 50 years until we had a year of pandemic disruptions.
When you've got something that has worked pretty much the same for 70+ years and something appears to go wrong in the last several years it makes sense that your primary suspects should be things that changed around the time that it started to go wrong.
When you see a polished video clip on the net, it's the cumulated result of an hour or more work for less than a minute of your time. Simply put, it doesn't scale.
If I spend hours making a video clip and put it up on YouTube it would be true, because no one follows me on YouTube.
The most views anything I ever posted got was just over 100, which was a short video of something weird that happened when I set my water bottle on top of my car that I no longer remember enough college physics to explain [1].
Second most was a water pipe like at the building my office was in [2]. That got a bit over 80.
Third has a little over 50. That was some chestnut backed chickadees landing on my hand to eat peanuts [3]. That's closely followed by some antics of a Douglas squirrel and an Eastern Gray squirrel on my front deck [4]. (BTW, if anyone watches the one with the chickadees, try watching in slow motion or single stepping. Some of them have cool poses that go by way to fast at normal speed to see).
I'm not actually sure why any of those have more than a handful views as they were put there to share with friends.
There are a couple in the 30s, which are the only ones I actually tried to get anyone other than friends to look at. Those are videos of my bike's rear tire on a stand, with a weight on the rim, rotated and allowed to swing back and forth. I posted those to a bicycling group, and asked if it was possible to determine from how long it took the oscillations to damp if my hub was in need of lubrication.
Everything else has been in the single digits.
So yeah, if I put any effort into a video (which I think only the leak and the chickadees one involved anything more than just selecting one continuous clip from something filmed in one take on my phone) it doesn't scale.
But what about people who do get a lot of views? If someone spends an hour on a video and a million different each spend a minute watching it that has scales pretty well. There are lots of people that can spend an hour on a video and probably get people spending years worth of time watching.
I feel like I started this way (in middle school and high school), but grew out of it over time. Basically had a video game addiction and could not for the life of me long-term-goal anything outside of school.
I think eventually I found that these short-term sweets are quite unfulfilling in the long-term, and now enjoy less immediately-stimulating hobbies like fitness, reading, learning, etc.
Hopefully people can grow out of this as they age.
I think we are in for big problems. I graduated from college in 2017 and my adult classmates couldn't even pay attention in class. If adults are hooked then children stand absolutely no chance.
The most chilling is that this also inflicts the military.
Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017:
> Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has continued to get worse. West Point has stated standards for academic expectations and performance, but they're ignored. Cadets routinely fail multiple classes, only to be thrown back into the mix. The faculty is expected to somehow drag them through the academic program until they manage to earn a passing grade. As a result, professors have lost hope and faith in the entire Academic Board process
And this is supposed to be the most prestigious institution in the armed forces, the people who will have nuclear weapons in their hands...Chilling. That's how the West ends up with leaders who do not know how to lead, reporters who do not report, officers who are clueless about real war, and diplomats who are incapable of being diplomatic
Nit: Nukes are under the Air Force. So the Air Force Academy would be the one to worry about. And they are having similar problems to West Point. But yes, any nuclear 'go/no-go' would go through the joint chiefs and would include all branches.
Is that a problem of shortened attention spans pervading the entire populace or the overall quality of recruits going south thanks to politicians who insist on using them as muscle for unnecessary wars?
I have a friend who is just at the end of finish her university degree in Germany in a sub field of economics. She cannot calculate with fractions.
She can also not write a 10-paged paper about shallow topics. I don't know what she can do tbh and I am really not trying to be arrogant or shitting on her. She uses her sister, who is smart but easily manipulated by younger sister with big pleading eyes, as a ghostwriter to pass all exams during Corona.
And she really isn't the only one. Some universities are incapable of guaranteeing a minimum baseline of quality of their graduates.
Probably because class is boring. People are happy to watch three hour criminal psychology interrogation videos on YouTube. It's the educators who need to change, not the students.
I've learned a lot more on YouTube than I did in a classroom, and I don't buy the idea that reading is somehow a superior form of learning than video.
think this is the new "opium" war that China engages in, our minds. Reduce the young generation to become emotional, depressed from dopamine fatigue, reduce their attention span and they have zero chance of rebellion.
hmmm yes but its a different type of addiction. In video games you still had to pay attention and at worst you'd develop some type of muscle memory or familiarity with a level but you were still focused on the game for hours.
TikTok and other short term media seems to have disastrous consequences for the young developing minds. Your setting up your brain to focus in short bursts and it immediately expects a dopamine hit.
I think we are already seeing signs of this amongst the Z generation, mental illness and well-being is reportedly lowest out of all demographics, and its puzzling why policy makers aren't taking note of this.
If I wanted to make the young generation of a hostile nation weak, ineffective, this is how I would do it. Create something that appeals to them, and turn the into dopamine fiends. It's no different than creating addicts that relies on other substances but because nothing is ingested, this type of neural behavioral programming is not seen as urgent.
I'm glad I don't have kids, I would be so stressed out about them in today's world. It's a completely different environment than the one we grew up with.
People have been saying that for centuries or longer. Kids these days have shorter attention spans. People said it about millennials, about gen-x, about baby boomers.
There’s a record of people complaining that kids are ruined by their reliance on writing things on paper, rather than slate.
There’s a record of Socrates complaining that the written word is ruining people’s memory. The record exists because Plato wrote it down.
Doesn't mean it's not true. There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not suggests there's something about the social environment we grow up in that strongly discourages the level of sustained commitment to a particular specialty neccessary for genius to develop. Having so many easily accessible forms of distraction on hand may well be part of the problem.
It means we should be asking for more than anecdotes.
> There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not […]
We definitely are churning out geniuses of this caliber. The bar for being a famous genius is higher.
But what made the likes of Newton/Einstein/Beethoven etc. stand out is how much they achieved given the limitations of the times they lived in. The reason I picked those three is all of them were known for being able to devote huge amounts of dedicated time to their specialty (Newton especially, who from memory developed most of the ideas in Principia while under effective lockdown during a smallpox outbreak. But unlike those of us under lockdown in recent years, there were no electronic gadgets distracting him either.)
Fairly sure Fleming didn't have anything like the distractions around now when he developed penicillin nearly 100 years ago!
The other examples seem to be very much group efforts, and I'd be impressed if the average guy or girl on the street could name the key figures involved.
It's possible we've simply reached a point where all the breakthroughs that realistically could be achieved by individuals have already been made, or that in the world of art there's simply too many artists able to readily share their creations with the world for individuals to stand out to the degree great artists of the past did. But I honestly don't know - it just seems that with so many more of us with access to resources and levels of education prior generations could only dream of we should be able to achieve a lot more than we have been.
It's much easier to be a polymath when the subjects are an expert in are pretty relatively unexplored. Today people spend their whole lifetime studying a deep branch in a single field, because the tree of math/physics/bio etc.. is much much more explored.
I spent a lot of time around potential geniuses growing up, and what sticks out to me is how many of them had their lives all planned out by the adults around them before they were in middle school. If anything, I think the lack of those people is because we've decided original thought isn't a virtue in our geniuses: We'd rather stick them in labs and use them tweaking models than give them the time and resources to explore on their own.
They're also identified and sheltered early enough that some of them don't develop resiliency + become dependent on the accolades they get, which also pushes them towards taking safer options. Big, creative genius disrupts things, and we train our gifted to not rock the boat. Even trying to found a unicorn company and going the VC route to become rich has a 'set path' at this point.
I also would doubt our young Newtons and Einsteins are spending much time on TT, unless they're studying it. It gets repetitive pretty quickly if you have the insight to start figuring out how it works, which those kids would. Genius kids' hobbies tend to differ from their peers'.
> It gets repetitive pretty quickly if you have the insight to start figuring out how it works, which those kids would. Genius kids' hobbies tend to differ from their peers'.
"I understand and now no longer care" is one of the most freeing feelings out there.
Alternative (but not exclusive) explanation: the easy pickings for geniuses have been picked over, and it takes longer than before to achieve genius-level accomplishments as a solo prodigy. Neither Einstein nor Beethoven contributed to multiple fields like Newton or Leonardo DaVinci did.
[Though Beethoven—or any musician—may be bad example(s) to include here: music is a field that is much less objective in ranking quality of ideas compared to ranking impact]
Beethoven's influence on the Western classical music tradition isn't disputed by any expert in that field - it truly was outsized and unmatched by any other individual composer. I'd accept the Beatles probably deserve the same recognition re popular music. It's fair to wonder how transformative they would have been if they'd existed in an era of Tiktok, Tinder and Snapchat.
Beethoven (or the Beatles)'s influence was not what I disputed. Rather, I dispute the assumption that the fact that they are the most influential automatically means they are also the best or most innovative.
I don't see it as a debate about "best" or even really "most innovative", just about individuals (or pairs in the case of Lennon/McCartney) that achieved a level of greatness (in terms of what contributions they've made to human knowledge/creativity) that logically you might expect to see a lot more of today given the vastly greater number of humans in existence now.
I wonder if "levels of greatness" is a relative quantity. If fourteen living composers are objectively as good as Beethoven/Lennon/McCartney (as one may expect with a much larger population), none of them will be recognized as great as Bach.
Woah, woah, who says we're not churning out geniuses? The rate of scientific research is doubling every ~18 months[0]. The arts have had an explosion of growth and creativity in the last decades. Some of the best musicians ever are currently living. Some of the greatest revolutions in science are currently on going. I mean, we got the vaccine to covid worked out over a weekend!
Sure, there are plenty of people born these days who presumably have the capacity for genius of the greats of the past. And yes, the sheer number of scientists working today, with access to knowledge and facilities far beyond what was available centuries ago is producing a stream of research and increased scientific understanding that is far greater than it's ever been. None of that invalidates the hypothesis (which is all I'd call it) that there'd potentially be more stand-out geniuses if we didn't live in a world with so many distractions available in devices we carry around with us all the time.
Wait. How can you disentangle the distractions of the world we live in from the result that there are more top-tier people working today? Saying that the variables are independent isn't enough. I'd say that the null hypothesis is that great communications technology is the root cause of both distractions and more 'geniuses'. You can't have one without the other to my eyes.
It's a testable hypothesis if you can get enough people to agree that their kids should be banned access to all such distractions (and such a ban to remain in place into adulthood). Obviously they'd still need access to electronically available information. Whether discussion forums/messaging apps count as distractions might be a grey area.
I honestly don't know what the result would be, or how long it would take to determine the outcome one way or another.
I mean, theoretically, yeah. You could do the test if you had some sort of absolute tyranny over people, a ton of money, about 1000 babies to otherwise do nothing else with, staff to raise those babies according to the experiment, and the 20-35 years of time to wait for the experiment to conclude. I'm sure I'm forgetting some crucial variable to control for though.
But that test is never going to be run. Nobody has that kind of time, that kind of money, that lack of morals, nor that energy to devote to this. There isn't a review board on the planet that would allow for this to occur, for good reason.
Agreed, it's not practical or particularly realistic - I don't think 1000 would be enough either. Maybe 50k? I'm not sure we'd like the results we might get either!
Anecdotally as a zoomer ('98, so I guess that's technically just on the precipice of being a zoomer), I definitely feel like a lot of my friends and colleagues my age have some form of attention deficit disorder, myself included (I've got pretty massive ADHD, but it mostly doesn't affect me other than making me hyper to the point of being annoying to others around me with my constant fidgeting and shifting). It's not a small sample size either, and all of us have had technology as an extremely integral/central part of our childhoods. Hell, I've been playing ADHD-fuel video games since I was 7 years old and I continue to do so, I really doubt that was good for me lol
I don't get the impression from talking to older folk that there's as much ADHD going around. You could argue this could be just due to awareness and older folk not getting diagnosed for it, but I think I'm pretty good at sussing out people with ADHD and similar disorders, and it's definitely mostly people my age I've noticed having it, at the very least my generation has more obvious and serious symptoms of it.
I love tech, screens and all that jazz, but I think it has a massive impact on the young brain in a way we haven't really fully studied yet, and even I'm fearing for my 4 year old nephews and their malleable brains, considering they've got access to the same type of tech I've been obsessed with, just at a younger age than me.
I agree it seems more prevalent in your generation. We are quicker to diagnose with pills, perhaps due to their availability and our lack of understanding about long term effects.
I think this is true in the US (from the stories I've heard/read about at least), I grew up in Southeast Asia though, there isn't much of a culture for over-prescribing (or prescribing anything really :p) people medication there. I've never even been medicated for my ADHD, and only 1 or 2 of my friends have as well and that was well after they turned 18.
I think tech really does have a bigger impact than we'd like to think, and certainly prescribing kids things like Ritalin at young ages when they're naturally a bit hyper definitely doesn't help either.
> I think this is true in the US (from the stories I've heard/read about at least), I grew up in Southeast Asia though, there isn't much of a culture for over-prescribing (or prescribing anything really :p) people medication there.
Yes, in some ways Asia has the opposite problem, not prescribing strong enough meds for emergency situations.
> certainly prescribing kids things like Ritalin at young ages when they're naturally a bit hyper definitely doesn't help either.
Yeah, I don't get this. Kids can't sit in class all day, with two parents working and too tired at home to bring them out after hours. People need exercise for their brains to work.
These days Vermintide 2 with its endless hordes and mechanical skill ceiling have been drawing me in (around 700 hours clocked so far). Feels like a game tailor-made for people with ADHD, considering there's barely a millisecond of gameplay with no action, at least on the higher difficulties
As a kid I would switch a lot, but God of War and the Devil May Cry series drew me in, for similar reasons to Vermintide these days. Was also partial to some Unreal Tournament and Quake multiplayer, I think highly mechanical games tend to work great for restless people like me since it's a good outlet for my fidgeting ticks!
I've (also anecdotally) observed this as an employer and in social settings. It's almost as if there's a correlation between being a heavy Tiktok user (who are predominantly pretty young) and having trouble focusing. It feels like a more advanced case of what happens to me when I use my phone a lot for basically any reason.
From this article[0] it seems the claims about attention span come from an unreliable source.
Given ‘kids these days’ have been cited as being disrespectful to their elders for thousands of years[1], I wouldn’t be surprised if the attention span is actually different between today’s Zoomers and a teenage boomer/millennial/X.
Just accept that the world is moving as/to a much faster iterations. Nowadays most companies are trying to be as efficient as they can (JIT model, etc), leaving less room to relax (Amazon of course).
In software sector, current ci/cd makes deployment and releases very fast and more often, as opposed to monthly/quarterly patches in the past. Newer technologies makes development faster and more efficient.
There are more contents being published than humanity can consume at a time. Messages are instant and distance is almost meaningless in face of internet. At the same time media providers are researching the best way to increase engagement.
kids are in school 9 hours a day, 5 days a week for 12+ years. if we are not using that time to facilitate developing their attention spans then the blame lies solely on the educators.
if kids aren't focusing in school, first and foremost look at the content and ask if any of it is actually engaging or meaningful. in my experience we largely dedicate them to shuffling around paperwork for which their greatest possible reward is a gold star and... more paperwork. we rob kids of agency or any sense of purpose and then snipe at them for not being sufficiently engaged in imp math 4.31, section 12, worksheet 29
the rudolph steiner/waldorf model is kooky in a lot of ways but one thing i do believe they got incredibly right is that they constantly have kids making actual things with their hands in the real world and all the technical concepts are buried within a grander narrative. also they let kids actually go outside.
Educators and employers are noticing they cannot keep students / new employees engaged.
Makes me wonder what damage is happening, long-term, with all these short bursts of dopamine that TikTok gives it users.