“No one can concentrate on anything for long these days. It’s completely ruining society.”
That’s quite a comment from my philosophically minded Uber driver, and it caught my attention. It had the ring of truth, something about which I’ve been thinking, but I was startled to hear this coming from a stranger. So I asked him to elaborate.
“It’s social media. Everyone is spending their days scrolling to get 3 and 4-second hits of instant gratification from content that has no meaning. We’ve lost patience for extended and meaningful narratives.”
You mean long movies?
“Not really. I mean big and important books, classics, well-constructed books, literary masterpieces put together with care that have stood the test of time.”
Intrigued by this, I thought further. It does have the ring of truth. To think that social media has done this to everyone in varying degrees is rather shocking. I do not exclude myself. The time I spend with long narratives that stretch over hundreds of pages and a reading time of many days has become ever less.
I was thrilled when the news cycle opened up and included ever more voices and more real-time updates. It seems like a better world than the one into which I was born, wherein three newscasters read almost identical scripts about the same big events. Everyone trusted them. We moved on with our lives.
Now we are tempted to believe that constant refreshing of pages will make us more informed. We are going to find out the truth of public life now. We are no longer denied alternative voices and we are being given stunning looks into alternative explanations. This is great, and we naturally think it is an improvement.
Maybe it is. Surely it is. But the question is, at what cost? It is gravely tempting to spend whatever excess time we have obsessing about this or that thing with infinite options of sources, podcasts, videos, feeds, trending topics, and unrelating blasts of breaking news that amaze us and probably further tribalize us.
What is the cost? It is what we would otherwise be doing. Maybe that is investing in personal relationships and family. Maybe it is picking up a big physical unplugged book and reading from page one, thrilling in the gradual unfolding of a narrative. Maybe it is thinking about long-term financial planning and learning new ways to think about finance and implementing the lessons.
There can be no doubt that this goes on ever less and less. A 20-something friend says he knows of only two people in several years who have read an actual book. We all know that it is true. Empirical evidence on this varies, and the book market itself seems to be doing fine. Whether and to what extent people under the age of 30 actually have extended and disciplined time with mighty books is a real question. Surveys alone won’t give the answer.
What does it matter anyway? Again, I asked my Uber driver.
“It’s completely changing people. And the culture too. It’s all about now, not the future. It’s all about whatever stimulation we can realize in the moment without a thought about the long term.”
So what?
“The problem is that this outlook makes people selfish. It’s all about themselves. They don’t care about others. They don’t even notice others. People are nowhere near as aware of what is around them and how others respond to them. Social media is turning everyone into a sociopath.”
That’s a serious charge, but I’m hard-pressed to dispute it. Several experiences on my travels have confirmed this, not big things but small ways in which people are disinclined to give up their temporary comfort for something larger than themselves.
Maybe it is making the middle seat available to someone on a plane where seating is unassigned. The first thought these days is to look out for number one and plot to keep everyone away.
How often do people help strangers with luggage? Do they even notice? How about letting someone else order food or drink before you do? How about letting others who might miss a flight get in front of you in a line to deplane?
These are small points but it certainly seems true that we grant less social deference to each other than we once did. Indeed, we once took basic manners for granted. Now it seems like it is every man for himself under all circumstances.
Of course every generation decries the corruption of its time while looking back nostalgically on times past. It’s a bias that stems from selection: It is easier to remember the good and forget the bad the more time has marched forward, and easier to be more aware of the bad around you than dig deeper for the good.
That’s always true. And yet, the advent of social media, universal pocket media displays, personalized earbuds, and infinite content choices is all very much new. Nor are they going away. If they have changed us as a people and a culture, is it forever? Can we push back on it?
My driver’s thesis—I’ve come to take more seriously the observations of a common worker over an Ivy professor—causes me to consider all the other ways in which our time horizons have been shortened.
It’s documented thoroughly that appliances that once lasted a generation now break in two or three years. We buy phones and computers—very expensive items—with no sense that we are investing for the future. We know for sure that they will last two or three years before we get another.
Shoes are the same. Throw down $150 for a pair that looks great but in six months of wear, they seem ready for the bin. It’s this way with most clothing. Forget handing down a suit to offspring. It falls apart after a few wears. The sweater that looks great at the store has tears here and there by the end of the season.
Most clothing has become disposable. Most everything in the digital world is this way, and the more our real-world products become digitized, the less they have by way of longevity. Hardly anything is fixable anymore; you are almost always better off throwing out and buying new.
With inflation as it has been for years, we are encouraged to spend now rather than save because the saving isn’t being rewarded. At best, we break even so why not go into debt buying “experiences” rather than thinking of the future?
The economist Irving Fisher introduced the concept of time preference to explain interest rates. He said that a lower rate of time preference means that people are willing to sacrifice consumption today by saving. That drives down the interest rate by making more funds available for lending.
The opposite is true too: a higher rate of time preference—the burning desire to consume now rather than plan for the future—leads to lower savings and a depleted fund for capital expansion. That causes higher interest rates, all else equal.
It’s fascinating to follow the thinking of Murray Rothbard, who saw in this time preference theory a big explanation for the rise and fall of societies. More developed civilizations are a result of lower time preferences: investment, long-term thinking, frugality, and putting off today’s joys for a better tomorrow. Less developed societies do the opposite, all the way toward the state of nature in which everyone is just getting by for today.
We might be living through what we could call the Great Shortening. Our time preferences are higher. Our attention spans are shorter. Our horizons and outlooks on our place in society are characterized by getting what’s good for me now rather than thinking about what’s good for family, community, and society in the long run. Instant gratification is the defining mark of cultural life. You see it everywhere.
In some ways, what happened five years ago with lockdowns shattered community feeling and drove forward a kind of short-term egoism. That has been reinforced by technology that feeds us exactly what we want: a zip and zing now rather than edification and contemplation about the future. The less hopeful we are about the future, the more it makes sense to live only for the present.
My point is not to highlight this one work but to urge everyone to pick up any one book, preferably physical. Make it a classic of Victorian-era literature or one of the great books you knew you should read but never did. Dedicate three long days to it, and you will see exactly what I mean.
You might find yourself shocked at what it archives for your mind and spirit. You cannot fix the social order or culture, but you can care for yourself by saying: I won’t be manipulated by the systems that encourage me to think only about the here and now. All of us can do our part, in our own self-interest, to remember what it takes to build great minds and lives.
