Time to pay less attention?

February 10, 2025

Dogs are among the wholesome distractions in our lives. Other natural, rational objects of our attention include our children, jobs, and homes, and for a lucky few with well developed executive function, actual beautiful hobbies like weaving or playing an instrument. Cars with knocking engines and muddy paw prints on back seats, trying to take care of or purposely ignore our health. Mittens with a hole, that running toilet, the neverending march of dinners that need to be presented. These mundanities used to fill up entire days, entire lives, most of our attention.

We now also have information demanding our attention. Really a lot of information. I mean a staggering amount of information. We have more information coming at us and filling up our brains than at any point in history (obviously). We are now consuming more information per day than a highly educated person 500 years ago dealt with in their entire lives. It’s about 74 GB, or the rough equivalent of 16 movies or 200 hours of scrolling on TikTok. Or we can take in about 200,000 written words per day, say, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Take your pick.

All of it fits in a still small object that sits in the palms of our hands.

I call it The Box Of All Knowledge, as in, “I have no idea! You have the Box Of All Knowledge–look it up yourself!”

All that information in the tiny portable package is constantly increasing, too. That object holds a network of practically infinitely expanding data, like a big bang in our pockets, except where the debris field gets in some ways smaller–more insular, more granular, more particular, and more tailored every day to our own individual wants via algorithmic manipulation. The explosion of information produced every day makes the amount we consume look austere by comparison, like we’re hermits in a cave. We create nearly 329 billion GB of information per day, roughly the equivalent of 164 trillion copies of War and Peace (to stick with the Russian literature theme). Anyone who has tried to keep up their reading on Substack will not find this hard to believe.

In the flying debris can be found bad recipes, good recipes, games brainworthy or inane, directions on how to make bombs, unsolved mysteries, secrets to weight loss, that sweet friendship between a cow and a kitten, results of cancer research trials and long videos full of medical lies, how to identify rocks, all manner of horrifying evil. In the box it’s all equal. It all jockeys for our attention equally. It all offers a satisfying dopamine hit. In the box we find interlocutors too–friends, family, and strangers from all over the world, whom we meet all on equal footing.

And perhaps most arresting, in the box we also find news.

It too is all on equal footing. We have to vet it ourselves. We have to determine its significance to us. We have to determine whether it is sound, or is based on evidence, or is fictitious, or is a stupid waste of time. I scroll along between Substack, Facebook, Apple News, and legacy media subscriptions and become easily snagged on “I Gave My Mother In Law A Pair Of Thrifted Shoes That Cost $2 And She Asked For The Receipt,” a clearly idiotic story swiped from social media and repackaged as news that nevertheless stuck out its foot and tripped me. (And for that seconds-long judgment error based on one click I will now receive dozens more such stories.) This bobs around on the same surface as that recently solved triple murder from 1982, a searing analysis of why our children are all miserable, all the evidence that teachers are the worst, why the French are better at literally everything, and 25 Secret Deals On Amazon Right Now.

Increasingly difficult for us to see, fighting for space bobbing around on that same cluttered Great Pacific Garbage Patch-like surface, is actual news, that is, coverage of actual events that are actually happening.

I suppose in ordinary times such a system is fine. Who cares what passes for news, in ordinary times.

But in times of urgent crisis, not so much.

Because here’s what happens to us when we bob around in a soup of 74 GB of information (remember–this is the amount we can process, not the amount that is created), all day, every day. The consequences I’m going to list will not surprise you. TLDR, our attention spans are attacked.

Navigating this information overload ocean changes us physically, says Dr. Gloria Mark in an episode of the Speaking of Psychology podcast entitled “Why our attention spans are shrinking.” We’re required to look at many things at once, or switch our focus from one thing to another, or both, all day. This causes a stress response and our blood pressure rises. Our performance drops due to “switch cost”–every time we switch our attention to something else and back again it takes several seconds for our brains to adjust, even for things as trivial as checking texts or popping onto facebook “for a minute.” Errors, both in basic tasks and of judgment, ensue.

It exhausts us. Daniel Levitan, author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in The Age of Information Overload, explains: “Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive, and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.”

News overload also robs us of sleep as we try to just read one more story (or eleven more). And sleep debt (yes, a technical term that can be applied to almost everyone) reduces attention span and leads us to do the easiest, most passive things–like scrolling on social media.

Our anger and anxiety rise–who has not felt this during the past year? No matter which “side” you’re on you’re going to be angry at someone and anxious about their actions. Anxious about not being able to know all the news. Anxious about not being able to do anything.

And the biggest cost of all? On top of increases in stress and blood pressure, mental exhaustion and actual fatigue, anger, and anxiety–being pummeled with this much information brings about a state of cognitive paralysis. We are simply unable to deal because it’s all too much to process.

Science tells us all this. You know who else knows it? Bad actors.

Bad actors are exploiting this right now, in our current context of the Constitutional crisis upon us. Trump apologist and charity defrauder Steve Bannon has said that the best strategy to make it impossible to follow what was happening, much less respond, is to “flood the zone with shit”–for the sole purpose of stupefying and confusing people so they can’t even react. It’s almost as if he spent his time in prison reading neuropsychology.

Trump is flooding the zone–with a toxic surge of misinformation and non-stop actions. Starting on Inauguration day with his 200 executive orders, and moving rapidly into the firings of Inspectors General and high level FBI officers, the Trump team then sent Musk and his band of vulgar, racist young lads into dozens of government departments and agencies, telling people to leave, intimidating, shoving, and shouting, and then plugging in their hard drives and downloading all the data. Once the lads have visited, the doors are locked and no one is allowed in. Meanwhile Trump continues to announce inane plans and orders every day, from the horrific: remove all the Palestinians (“it’s over”), clear the land, and build resorts (“I would own this” now)–to the trivial yet pointless: ban the bans on plastic straws (currently up to the states, and let the record be clear, in the too-frequent purchasing of fast food that I do, I am NEVER given a paper straw in Chicago). All of this is happening within the span of days. No wonder folks are flabbergasted. Science assures us it is impossible for this to happen any other way.

What the Trump administration wants, and is flooding the zone to do, is dismantle the structure of the American government. His apologists and legacy media alike tell us that as the executive power, Trump has the right to reevaluate [fill in the blank] to save money. What they are doing is not reevaluating or auditing–something that happens every year to all departments anyway. There are ways to audit, and this is not that. Cutting funding that’s already been approved by Congress is illegal and renders Congress pointless. Illegally firing tens of thousands of federal workers to save money (?) is certainly offset by the $7M a week Musk is spending on his lads. These are not actions taken by folks who care about the Constitution or the rule of law. They are actions taken by people who know to cram all of it together in a span of days, to create a creepy rigged game of Whack-a-mole that we have no hope of winning.

And yet. People have been responding–calling their congressmen at rate that is 3900% (not a typo) higher than normal. (I know, there are such a lot of numbers in this post, sorry!) And it does make a difference: legislators were ostensibly elected by their constituents and must listen to them. The courts are stepping in to flag illegal actions taken by Musk’s callow youths. Musk of course responds that those judges must be “fired.” He clearly knows nothing about and/or simply does not care about the balance of power and the rule of law in our Constitutional republic. I guess he missed the Schoolhouse Rock episode about this.

In this messy morass of lawbreaking and misinformation, there are things we can do, if we care to. I’ll share a few below. But most important is to realize that right now our attention spans are being stretched to the breaking point on purpose. We feel tired and anxious for a reason. So we need to take care of our attention. More than ever, now we should be limiting the amount of pointless information we are taking in–ratchet back the mindless scrolling. We must be very purposeful in what we read and watch–find a few trusted, centrist news sources. For the love of God, get enough sleep. And let’s focus our energy to do something every day to stand up for the country we love.

Let’s get started:

5Calls.org: This app helps you call your Congressmen every day, giving guidance about issues and supplying a text for your phone calls if you want one.

Chop Wood, Carry Water. A 5-day a week Substack newsletter that gives five to seven minutes worth of daily political actions you can take to impact our democracy.

Indivisible can connect you with local folks wherever you are for political actions.

Interfaith Alliance, whose tagline is “Achieving Democracy Together,” has been standing for communities of faith since 1994 and is mounting a thoughtful response to this administration’s anti-Christian actions. If you’re a person of faith this is a good place to go.