JESSIE STEPHENS: 'Anyone else suffering from "continuous partial attention"?'

This article originally appeared on Jessie Stephens' Substack, Dwelling. Sign up here.

I am afraid that most of what I consume is making me dumber.

Last night I spent three and a half minutes watching a woman decorate a cake with a tennis racquet. She was holding it over the cake, using it as a stencil. I kept watching because I was curious how it would turn out. I needed to understand her vision. She used four different spray paint cans (were they edible? What flavour?) and the more she added the less I understood where this was going. What was she painting? I wondered. What was the point? How many minutes, of my finite minutes, would I afford this stranger who had done nothing to deserve any of them?

Finally, she lifted the tennis racquet off the cake.

It was ruined.

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The stencil hadn't worked. Of course it hadn't. The cake was just brown, dripping in what was probably poisonous, pollutant spray paint.

I felt very angry that there had clearly never even been a vision, so then I had to read all the comments, where people shared their frustration that their time had been wasted. That's why they'd spent another thirty seconds leaving a comment. And maybe a few more minutes engaging with other comments. Because they were so indignant. That their time had been wasted.

This video was depressing precisely because it was not an anomaly.

Like most things I consume it was a) dumb b) made be angry and c) was ultimately pointless.

That's how I've ended up here. Writing this.

We are being inundated with unexamined, unhelpful, drivel. Most of what we consume online is unprocessed. From rants to tears, to half-baked opinions laden with logical flaws, we're just vomiting up whatever is closest to the surface and then madly trading it in a shallow content economy. It feels sometimes like we live in a world of half thoughts, of sentences we don't bother to finish, where none of us (I'm counting myself in this) sit with anything long enough to truly work it out or come to any meaningful conclusions.

We don't present arguments, we deliver hot takes. We don't present a thesis, we deliver tirades. The result is we're swimming in a sea of content that literally doesn't make any sense.

Oxford Word of the Year in 2024 was "brain rot", referring to the deterioration of a person's intellectual state, largely due to the overconsumption of online content that is both trivial and unchallenging. It me! (Help I can't stop speaking internet and I hate it).

There is certainly a general sense that whatever is happening to our brains isn't good. We don't need a study to prove it. My husband has taken to showing me TikTok videos of a vlogging AI-generated Yeti and while I don't have physical proof that the synapses in my brain are being irreparably damaged, I do know how it feels. And it feels like my soul is being poisoned.

People far cleverer than me were writing about this phenomenon decades ago. Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves To Death, warned in 1985 that "people will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think". Ultimately, he argued that our addiction to amusement is oppressive. We will become increasingly overwhelmed by 'information glut', unaware that we have lost all that is truly meaningful, without the capacity to even reflect on what is truly meaningful because we are too busy being amused.

Oh, Postman. You cannot begin to imagine how much worse things get.

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We're enduring an assault on our attention spans, and the consequence of only being able to concentrate in thirty-second increments is that we're prohibited from accessing any kind of depth.

Linda Stone, a former Microsoft Executive and Apple employee, has identified something she calls "continuous partial attention"; the condition of needing to be part of multiple threads (literal and figurative) at once. Critically, this is an involuntary, automatic process. And this process makes everything, from the way our brain functions, to stress levels, to productivity, to our relationships, to decision making, to memory, to our very sense of fulfillment, palpably worse.

So my question lately has become: if we're in a state of continuous partial attention, where and when are we doing the work of 'thinking'?

This is probably why I miss writing so much. It's where I do my working out, and find things I never would if I didn't sit with an idea for a while. Not rushing feels like a radical act.

The problem with writing, and thinking for that matter, is that it's awfully inefficient. A writer named Maalvika wrote on Substack recently, "we've created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency," which has given way to a sort of "compression sickness [that] has infected everything". Everything must be short and bite-sized and can you just give me the TL;DR? (Mum, that stands for too long; didn't read).

But I want to spend (some of) my time doing something slow and messy. A lot of my writing — spoiler — is really, really bad at first. After an edit, it's just moderately bad. It's hard to justify spending a few hours on what sometimes amounts to nothing. Maybe a post I'd never want to publish. Or an argument that doesn't stand. Trying to write at the moment feels like one of those dreams where you try to run and you can't. The flow isn't coming naturally. I can't find my rhythm. I'm out of practice. But bad writing precedes good writing.

So I've started this newsletter, Dwelling, to force myself to sit with something for a while, and see what comes out. I want to write because I want to think.

Hopefully we can do that together.

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Feature image: Getty.