You're not imagining it. In 2025 we're all struggling to watch TV.

Two weeks into my Christmas break, I settled in to finally binge Bump on Stan as someone who'd been excitedly anticipating the release of season five on Boxing Day.

Within 10 minutes, I had to quickly toggle to 'subtitles on'.

By the end of the first 27-minute episode, I reckon I had checked Instagram and TikTok at least two times each.

By the time I was halfway through the second episode, I had paused the show to focus on a doom-scroll topic I had stumbled across in one of my intermittent social media checks.

To be clear, this behaviour had nothing to do with the show. It was great.

It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me….

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I don't think I watched a single movie over my break in full. I actively avoid foreign films that aren't dubbed when I do sit down to watch one, because they require me to focus solely on one screen. I've also, embarrassingly, been known to spend hours of down-time doom-scrolling instead of actually consuming anything of substance.

My attention span is officially broken, and turns out, I am not alone.

My colleague Polly informed me that even when she was watching Wicked in a packed-out cinema recently, half the people there were also scrolling on their phones.

Tahli has such an issue with focus, she actively puts her phone on 'do not disturb' while watching a film.

Stef typically only watches TV shows under 27 minutes, because anything over that is too much of a time commitment.

We knew screens and socials were destroying us, but this is truly abysmal. In 2025, we can't even watch TV.

According to a study out of California, the average focus time for individuals looking at a singular screen dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to an average of 47 seconds in 2021.

But that was pre-pandemic, aka, pre-TikTok's explosion and the rise in short-form video content. I shudder to think what the average focus time is now.

Social media is addictive by design thanks to the hits of dopamine it induces to keep us coming back over and over again. That's old news now, but even the writers behind our favourite TV shows and movies are having to adapt their craft to our dwindling attention spans.

In an article in N+1 magazine in December, author Will Tavlin spoke to multiple Netflix screenwriters who said that, when writing dialogue, they were given a note to "have this character announce what they're doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along".

The admission sparked more grim ones, with TV writer Dylan Park Pettiford remarking that TV executives had explicitly asked him for "TV you don't have to pay attention to."

People thought I was making this up when a TV exec told me this last year. https://t.co/ETmoczKRBq pic.twitter.com/Adsc3tgKxb

— Dylan Park-Pettiford (@dyllyp) December 28, 2024

"We're so cooked," wrote one commenter under Pettiford's post, and they're not wrong. It's pretty dang depressing.

Interestingly, in 2024, we saw a decrease in the amount of content 'normal' people chose to post on their own social media profiles. But it seems that while we might be posting less, we're actually scrolling more. A study out of Canterbury University suggested that we spend more time scrolling on socials than we do eating or exercising in a day.

Of the 400 18-44-year-olds surveyed, the average time spent on platforms was two-and-half-hours. I didn't even blink reading that stat — it doesn't surprise me in the slightest. But it should. That's a stupid amount of time for anyone other than someone working in the social media space.

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I do have some good news — apparently there is a different reason why we're all leaning into having more subtitles on when we watch TV.

According to dialogue editor Austin Olivia Kendrick, we can blame the new itty-bitty microphones actors use in modern productions and the literal technology on our TVs.

Speaking to Vox, he explained that back-in-the-day actors had to enunciate and project and speak directly into large mics, whereas now they can be strapped to their bodies, and they can speak at normal volume/mumble/act more realistically, which in turn makes them harder to understand.

Our TVs are also too thin to hold microphones facing in the right direction, (they're often on the back!), so we're literally straining to hear dialogue.

That, at least, is non-screen-related. But everything else? Yeah, we can blame the addiction to our phones.

In 2025, one of my goals (for many reasons) is to be on my phone less. It's time for my brain-rot era to end.

The fact I'm going to actively try to stick to one screen while watching TV is a truly laughable first-world problem to have in our modern times, but here we are.

The realisation that my addiction has now bled into my TV and movie watching is the final straw of ridiculous for me. Something has got to change.

Operation 'recover my attention span' officially starts now.

How's your attention span faring in 2025? Let us know in the comments below.