Why Is Our Attention-Span Declining?
Questioner: Sir good afternoon. My question is, nowadays we use YouTube shorts, Instagram reels and other such short video platforms and they are really shortening our attention span. So, my question is how can we use technology and media in such a way that it doesn’t affect our attention span and what are some ways to maximize it. Thankyou sir.
Acharya Prashant: See, it is primarily not about the span of attention. The important thing is not really for how long you can hold your attention on an object. The important thing is, what is the quality of the object you are attending to, and the nature of the human consciousness is such that, only very specific type of objects can really hold your attention for long. Let me go a little deeper into it.
You see our mind; our consciousness is constantly searching for something.
Getting it?
Man is the name of a life-long craving. We are continuously a longing and the world is full of infinite objects and we do not know those objects and therefore we keep approaching those objects, one after the other incessantly, all our life, in the hope that our internal longing will come to rest through one of those objects. That’s why we are constantly restless. That’s why we are constantly trying, experimenting, knocking at one door after the other.
Getting it?
Now that is the reason why the short format, the short video format in social media has been inevitable and since it has arrived over the last few years it has been more successful than the longer formats because the audience without even knowing, it in an unconscious way, is looking at something extraordinary. Now if you give them a thirty-minute piece to watch, by the second or third minute, it is anyway clear that the thing that you are looking for is not going to be found in that long video, right? So, after the third minute the audience will drop out. After the third minute the audience will anyway drop out, because it has become clear that the video is not what your deepest self, wanted.
So how do the video makers, how do the so-called content creators cope with this? They said, “We know that we cannot hold the audience anyway for more than three minutes. So, we will give them just one minute of content, and then the danger of the audience running away reduces,” and then the proportion of the video that has been watched improves because if you see on an average, if people are watching three minutes out of thirty-minute content that is just 10%, right? The algorithm will record that the average duration viewed is just 10% of the video length, whereas if you serve them just a fifty seconds thing, the audience will watch it for thirty-forty seconds before they can make up their mind to drop out. Right?
Even if you discover that the video is trash, still you would have spent a few seconds on the video: ten, twenty, thirty seconds something. So, even if you spend fifteen seconds on a forty-five second short or reel, or something, you have still watched 33% of the video length. Now this 33% is far better than the 10% that you watch on the long video. So, this little thing gets more favorably ranked on the YouTube or Instagram algorithm. Right?
Do you see the fundamental reason, the fundamental reason is everybody be it the long video creator, the short video creator, the movie maker, the Netflix maker does not matter who he is, everybody knows that the content you are serving, does not have the touch of eternity in it, it does not have that all essential quality in it that can simply bind the viewer to the screen.
So, people are trying all kinds of tricks. They have to try these tricks because they are finding themselves unable to address the central problem and the central problem, as I mentioned right in the first sentence today, is not the length of the attention span. The central problem is the quality of the object you are serving to your audience. Is the content worth it? If the content is worth it then people can watch even it for one hour, two hours any length, does not matter.
The epics have been so long lasting, and do you know the number of verses they contain? The number of verses run into its course of ten thousand verses, twenty thousand verses, forty thousand verses, more than a lakh verses and yet they have been eternal and immortal. If you talk of the Vedas, the Rig Veda itself has ten thousand verses or if you go to Homer and talk of Iliad and Odyssey, again the length of the work is so daunting, but still it has been with the people and they have just loved it.
So, it’s not that people are afraid of length really. People are just fed up of trash, trash and trash does not necessarily refer to production values. It does not really refer to how attractively, how lucratively you have packaged the whole thing. It refers to what is inside the package. It is the stuff that is inside the package that’s what I’m referring as trash. What is the message you’re delivering? What is the insight you are providing through your video? Is there something in the video that will give some relief to my otherwise tormented life?
Be it a youngster, a man, a woman, a professional, a student, an old man, a Hindu, a Muslim, a rich man somebody looking for a job, it does not matter; we all are missing something very essential in our life. Now is your video or your story or whatever you have as an artist, is that able to provide me something that will fill up the hollow here in my chest? At the center of my existence is a big void and it pains, it pains incessantly.
If you are a video creator, you are an artist. If you are a painter, or a story teller, you are an artist. Do you have it in you? Does your art contain that beauty, that truth that will bring some sucker to my, to my charred life. A few, a few drops of relief to my parched existence. So that’s the problem. And if you do not solve that problem, you will find even one minute is too much. People will run away from you in five seconds because what you are bringing to them is just so repetitive and old and dull and boring. Within five seconds people have begun to discover that the stuff being served is just a rehash of something old. Now the old thing itself was unable to provide any relief. What will this thing in the new package do.
No hope. So, one just scrolls away and you hold the mobile phone like this and with one thumb or one finger you are just scrolling away even five seconds is just too much now. So, that’s the thing, ours is age of a very special kind of crisis you see. There is a complete proliferation of all kinds of colorful objects all around.
You want to buy a car, you will be flooded with choices. You specify a budget, fifteen to twenty-five kinds of models are available. You want to buy a shirt, ‘n’ number of brands. You want to visit a place so many options and so many tour travel operators. You want to eat, just look at the ever-lengthening menu. The entire culinary expanse of the world is available on the table. Choices, choices everywhere. That’s what the industrial age has done right? Go to amazon; doesn’t matter what you want, it will be delivered at your doorsteps.
People are truly empowered. So objects all around, and yet nothing can satisfy you. I am reminded of that beautiful poem.
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink, a lost ship in the middle of a vast ocean. Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.
That’s our state. In the language of social media, you can say, “content, content everywhere but not one video of relief.
So, instead of taking the issue head-on instead of discovering the root cause as usual we have relied more on trickery, cunningness, and shortcuts. So, we have said Okay, we will keep reducing the length of the video we will keep loading it with special effects. Look at the, look at the VFX content in movies these days. Why do you need that so much? Why? There is a reason? And unless you understand the reason you will not understand the age you are living in. You will not understand the world. You will not understand your own life.
Why so many filters are needed? There is a reason and the reason is very important to know. You cannot have a video where you are just saying something, something important in a simple way. Because nothing important is being said at all. Trash is being served in innumerable avatars and therefore you require all kind of embellishments, filters, and decorations and editing and effects and all the jazz.
Getting it?
Questioner: Yes sir.
