Saturated Attention
Saturday-Sunday, August 30-31, 2025
Saturated Attention
For every hour of your daily awareness, there are circa 10,000 hours (a scientific estimate!) of content vying to take it hostage. Sure: You can try speed-reading, or adjusting the playback settings to play the audio or video at 1.5x or 2x speed—but there’s no way to overcome the mismatch in time available to consume it all. Besides, all that media consumption blots out the steady stream of ideation and talk within our own minds.
You want to talk about sensory overload? That’s sensory overload. Even if you figure 90 percent of that content—everything from audiovisual arts to written text—is fundamentally uninteresting to you personally, that’s still 1,000 hours (more science!) of content you need to consume every waking hour—of stuff you would probably like and agree with.
Is it any wonder people feel stressed out?
With 1,000 hours of hypothetically appealing content for every hour of daily awareness, one possible response is refusal. You can decide it’s all just hopeless online, and maybe it’s best to unplug from it and do things in the physical world.
Well, that would seem to be something we could call “a solution.” But what if consuming all that online content just left your physical world hollow and empty? Once you’ve entered the dopaminergic trap of digital media, you’ve made the choice to neglect the real world, consciously or not. Life in the real world atrophies. It shrinks in your mind. The brain’s plasticity goes to work establishing the neural structures for dealing with the online world to the detriment of dealing with the physical world.
This is why I try to limit my time online, to focus it on a limited number of items. Is the approach is working or not? It’s too early to tell. Give it a decade or two.
Just knowing that content seeking my attention is now produced by machine—the AI revolution—is motivating. It’s motivating me to want to do less online.
So there it is. I’ve done the math, and it’s all clear. We’ve got to do something. And I’ll be outside when you’ve come up with a solution to tell me about.
Meanwhile, enjoy the Labor Day weekend.
And here’s a picture to look at:
Good morning. We were going to do something outside this morning, but I need to continue the rehab of Daughter D's room, instead.
F's goofball friend wanted him to go out last night to ... I don't know what. "You're not allowed to drive after 9:00," I said. "My other friend will drive us back: he's 19." "No, I don't feel comfortable with a 19-year-old friend-of-a-friend driving at midnight. Plan something in the daytime."
Today's wedding was a success in spite of the bride's arriving 20 minutes late. We have almost 2 weeks before the next one.