Our sad, sad attention spans
Or: everything is boring, but not the way you think
In my 20’s, I knew a lot of people who were worried that, since leaving University, they had become stupider. A few years before they’d been able to talk in a sophisticated, nuanced way about brutalist architecture or 16th century English drama or the Aho-Corasick algorithm or pop art; why was it, they asked, that now, when they tried to approach any of those formerly-fascinating subjects, their minds at best fuzzed with half-remembered 10-page papers, and at worst went glassy and blank? Now, in my late 30’s, the stance is less anxiety and more defensive resignation. I never truly cared about that stuff, it was only the twin evils of capitalism and academia that made me think it was important. I only want to occupy myself with things I genuinely enjoy and find interesting. These sentiments get packaged up into online “pieces” of both the trend- and think- variety, but as with many of these sentiments I have to wonder whether it’s a true shift in the culture or just the fact that my generational cohort is getting older.
I often wonder, about certain things I loved at a young age and continue to love, whether I would have had the patience for them if I encountered them for the first time in middle age. Would I be able to concentrate on learning to play piano scales, the way I did at nine? Memorizing all the tricks needed to not die in the first 10 minutes of Ancient Domains of Mystery, the way I did at 19? If I tried to sit through my first Wagner opera at age 39 without the bolstering memory of listening at 22, would I be in agonies of boredom? Could I even learn to program a computer, spending hours trying to get Hello World to compile? I truly can’t say. Part of why I make a point of reading difficult books is that I find it pleasurable to tease out their meanings, but there’s also a grubbier part, the ego part, that simply wants reassurance that I’m not stupid yet.
A movie beloved to me is Napoleon vu par Abel Gance, a 4-hour silent-era epic which was inexplicably available for VHS rental in my local Rogers video store in Edmonton in the late 90’s. Legal issues have prevented its full release in North America for decades, but when it became available on Blu-Ray in Britain a few years ago, I ordered a copy. Their edition included some newly-unearthed footage, stretching the running time to nearly five hours. Much of the new footage is, unfortunately, added to the movie’s weakest section — Napoleon visiting his mother in Corsica — and, viewing new scenes which had no cherished place in my memory, I was struck with the thought that it was boring, unwatchable, a mess! I was horrified. The other scenes that I remembered as great were, at least, still great. But one of a movie-lover’s greatest pleasures is to show their favorites to someone else, hopefully giving them the pleasures you first found in it, and the opportunity to see the beloved thing anew. I can never, in good conscience, show this movie to anyone, I thought. It is five hours long and at least thirty percent boring.
Still, I want to poke at the idea of boring a bit. We almost take it for granted now that people have shorter attention spans, which is supposed to mean less tolerance for boredom. We have an easy culprit: the glassy, blank, endlessly diverting screens of our ever-present phones, and the cartoon characters who constantly light them up with fresh distractions. We can’t read books or watch movies anymore without compulsively thumbing the glass, minds seeking something with more entertainment value. is movie bad? or is phone just better? goes the joke tweet. Every time I reach for my phone while watching a movie, the question repeats in my head.
But let me propose a new theory: everything is boring and getting more boring all the time.
Opera has a reputation for being boring, and I can’t pretend that it’s not well-deserved. Operas are generally lengthy, and visually static, with plots that move forward at a rate of ten centimeters an hour. The music is sometimes transcendently beautiful, which makes up for the times when it’s unremarkable filler.
But! My experience at rock concerts and big popular music festivals is that these, too, are deeply boring most of the time. And not just boring in a “not to my taste” way but objectively boring. At a show, you stand there for hours, drinking to pass the time, waiting through opening acts you don’t care about. It’s too loud to have a conversation. You’re in line for the bathroom, the bar, the merch table. There’s the interminable longeur before the headliner comes on. Then, when your favorites are finally on stage, you may not actually be able to see them. Those moments where they’re playing their best songs and you know all the words and the music is moving your body along with it as though you were a marionette? Ecstasy! But before that: tedium, hours of it. An opera-length of an evening, a half hour of fun.
Many other fun activities (and I’m not using that word with irony) have embedded stretches of boredom. Travel means hours in a plane or a car, unchanging and often uninspiring landscapes crawling by. Skiing has one of the lowest activity-to-waiting-around ratios of any activity I can think of. Video games, designed to be maximally entertaining, have birthed the term “grinding” — the slow, slow process of completing boring, repetitive tasks in order to have a better chance of succeeding at the interesting tasks later on. This basic paradigm is understandable to me: you tolerate the grind, because it’s the only way to get to the good part.
Here’s the more interesting, more confusing pattern: the replacement of fun things with boring things. For some people, the fun activity of playing video games has been pre-empted by the more boring activity of watching other people play video games. Other objectively fun activities like eating a delicious meal, being at a party with good friends, lounging in a pool — routinely supplanted by the dull frenzy of the phone.
Before the internet, it was television that was supposedly rotting our attention spans, luring our powerless brains away from more valuable activities like reading Tolstoy, playing street hockey, calling our mothers, learning French. But how profoundly boring television used to be, still is! Ten minutes of ads to twenty minutes of programming, news channels playing the same clips over and over again, reruns of B-grade laugh track sitcoms and flop movies, and what’s worse, the same jaunty commercials for weeks, months! You could spend an hour cycling through the same 30 channels, trying and failing to find something halfway watchable, finally exhaling at the unearthing of a precious Frasier rerun. And yet it was hypnotic, with whole evenings swallowed up by fruitless channel-surfing — why?
Social media, while supposedly refined for maximum engagement, is not less boring. I know this as someone who can easily spend hours scrolling twitter in search of a funny quip, an interesting article, a bit of news or gossip. The casino comparison has been made before when talking about social media’s addictiveness; one bothersome way in which twitter is like a casino is the relative rarity of the payoff.
One thing of which I am certain: if someone were to print out the top ten thousand tweets from my feed, print them out on paper, bind them like a book, and give it to me as a gift, it would be without question the dullest book on my bookshelf. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read past the first two or three pages. And the endless pictures of clothes I scroll through on shopping websites — if all those little thumbnails were collected in a coffee table book, would it be a fraction as beautiful as a fashion magazine? And yet, I keep running my eyes over those thumbnails of identical army-green coats, and hours disappear.
Troublingly, scrolling in the hunt for something interesting can get nearly frantic. The endless swiping, refreshing, switching from app to app, skimming articles nearly devoid of content — the agitated hunt for anything, anything at all to arouse a glimmer of interest. Why do I ever think I will find it there? Why do I keep looking?
I can only conclude that humans tolerate boredom very well. Why we are most helpless against the forms of boredom with the absolute lowest payoff is mysterious to me.