Every day, before I head off to a lecture or some other extra-curricular activity, I check my phone, hoping to find some sort of refuge behind the blue light away from a hangover the previous night. The solace is short lived because as soon as doomscrolling sets in, I’m hit with three crises, four scandals, and some AI generated slop to finish it all off. So, by the time I’ve rolled out of bed and brushed my teeth, I’m already numb. Not because I don’t care, but because I’ve been asked to care about everything before I’ve even decided what to have for breakfast. So, why does it feel impossible to care anymore? And what does it mean when an entire generation experiences caring as exhaustive?
We now, for better or worse, live in an attention economy, with our apps and social media combating each other, all for our attention spans which are shrinking due to a negative feedback loop of short form content. This is sensationalised and designed to give us our dopamine hits that much quicker, messing with our fear, outrage, and moral disgust. In turn, this trains us to expect intense stimulation, making anything else boring and irrelevant, pushing platforms to further sensationalise and shorten our attention spans. The world and its many happenings are immensely complex, and so, to ask us to process this on the same platform that we watch AI cat videos is almost insulting. These issues do not fit into 280 characters or a short on TikTok and Instagram. They require context, introspect, and sustained attention – something that the attention economy has trained out of us. There is a cruel irony: with the world in our pockets, our attention is spread thin. We try to cover the world, but have no capacity to sit with an issue long enough to fully understand what it means.
While news articles and long-form content still exist online – providing an alternative to short-form slop – even these have hardly escaped the attention economy. News articles that once were physically printed in a daily or weekly newspaper now find themselves forced over to the digital realm. This fundamentally changes how articles are written; they were once allowed to articulate their thoughts, delving into issues with depth and rigour, but not any more. Reporters are now having to consider the all-consuming metrics of clicks, comments, and likes, having to keep the reader hooked on their page for as long as possible, which, with our decreasing attention spans, is a mammoth task.
So, articles are shortened, sensationalised, and opinionated, to the point that they are mutilated versions compared to the physical format. There are exceptions to this rule however: the holy grail of digital news. But this is hidden behind paywalls and subscription fees, or littered with enough banner ads to confuse you about what is article and what is ad. With the abundance of other less intrusive and free options, it is only natural that people drift towards more optimised news outlets – the very outlets that are suffocated by this attention economy, which shortens articles, sensationalises issues, and is, increasingly, opinionated to the nth degree, creating the same negative feedback loop that haunts short-form content.
News channels on platforms such as YouTube are hardly the answer either, with algorithms deciding what is optimum for the viewer rather than the viewer deciding for themselves. This leads to pressure where uploads must be frequent, the thumbnails eye-catching, the title click-baiting. This is abysmal, throwing away any notion of user agency and practically requiring the news channels to be sensational, all in the name of ad revenue to appease the algorithm. On top of this, they are incentivised to create content around 8 to 10 minutes long. No matter the issue, whether it be potholes in a county or a coup d’etat in another country, it is bound to these metrics – leading to the artificial padding of minor stories that are now treated the same as crises like coups d’etat. This is why the news that we digest on social platforms, both long and short-form, is always a crisis or a scandal. Algorithms and incentives push the attention economy to its limit; the only way to survive is to make news and information clickable, unavoidable, and simplified to a metric. So what happens to us when we’re forced to process the world this way?
When I scroll through my feed in the morning, past the minister’s resignation, the riots in another country, and the humanitarian crisis of a sanctioned nation, I experience what I can only describe as dread. Not for anything in particular, but for my inability to process and sit with these issues in the 30 seconds that my feed is designed for. I know I should care; I do. But caring feels futile when the very platforms delivering this information are designed to hurry me along, before I can absorb what I’ve just seen. The exhaustion isn’t because I’ve been asked to care too much about too many things. It’s from being asked to care in a way that makes genuine caring practically impossible. I do often try to escape reels and consume long-form content, in an attempt to properly care and empathise with current affairs, by going to YouTube and online news outlets. But, as mentioned before, these are plagued with the same issues as short-form content, and are either overextended or too simplified and sensationalist to articulate meaningfully the information they are presenting. So I am left with the very same dread that I woke up with – hardly a thing that should be lingering on one’s mind when other pressing issues, such as breakfast, are on the line.
But I’m not alone in this. This dread is generational. We’re the cohort that grew up with the world in our pockets, and we’re discovering that infinite information doesn’t create infinite empathy: it creates paralysis. We know about more crises and scandals than any other generation in history, but that awareness does not translate into action. When everything is urgent, nothing is. When every issue demands our immediate attention, the only sustainable response is not to care about any of them fully. The liking and sharing of posts doesn’t feel meaningful; it just perpetuates the feedback loop that overwhelms us. The amount of information that we are exposed to regulates us. To survive in such a demanding environment, we develop numbness as a coping mechanism. We perform care through likes and shares, watching the numbers climb and mistaking our dopamine hit for meaningful engagement. But it’s not action, it’s the simulation of action, rewarded by algorithms designed to keep us scrolling.
So what happens when an entire generation is conditioned this way?
We risk losing our capacity to act meaningfully. Real change doesn’t come from viral moments or performative posts from those with the most followers. It comes from the ability to sit with an issue, form your own opinion, debate it, and then act upon it in a constructive way – rather than simply regurgitating one from a 20-second video. But, importantly, we are aware of this, aware that something isn’t quite right. The attention economy is powerful, but it’s not an inevitable force. We can choose to care selectively, about less, you could say. It’s paradoxical, I know, but we should focus on fewer issues, ignoring the pothole crisis in Skegness, for example. Accepting that we were never meant to care about everything isn’t a moral failure, it’s human.
But this goes deeper than a generation’s collective coping strategy. If he were alive today, John Stuart Mill, whilst probably also being on his phone habitually, would be disgusted at the degradation of our liberty. With algorithms curating everything from purchasing habits to political opinions, Mill’s vision of the self-determining individual seems almost quaint. How are we able to pursue our own conception of the good life when we’re fed 30-second videos and articles with more ads than words? There is no debate or discussion, no pushback, and not really any ask to think. The attention economy doesn’t fail to inform me, it actively undermines my capacity to have sustained reflection or informed debate. Mill understood that liberty does not just mean having a multitude of options, it’s about having the capacity to choose between them. But in a system that is designed to capture you and keep you on digital platforms, that choice is taken away from you. The ability to exercise genuine autonomy requires conditions which the attention economy has systematically destroyed.
Yet, the fact we recognise this is our first step in combatting the problem. There are alternatives in the margins, and communities and societies sustained around debate and consistent engagement. There are publications that refuse to sensationalise and are optimised for depth rather than ad revenue. Every time we choose to read long-form content, to sit with discomfort instead of scrolling past it, we push back against a system designed to keep us scattered.
The cost of attempting to care about everything is caring about nothing. But the alternative isn’t pessimistic, it’s discreet. To genuinely care is to be selective. I still wake up and feel that algorithmic dread, but I try to read instead of watch. It takes me time, but at least it lets me eat breakfast.