Karly

About a year ago, I found myself doing something that felt strangely absurd. I was listening to the New Heights podcast episode featuring Taylor Swift, an episode I’d been looking forward to ever since it was announced, yet somewhere around the halfway mark I realised my mind had quietly wandered elsewhere. I wasn’t bored, nor did I dislike the conversation, but I caught myself reaching for my phone, opening other apps without really thinking about it and eventually deciding that I’d simply have to come back and finish the episode another day. As embarrassing as it is to admit, that was probably the first moment I stopped and wondered what had happened to my attention span.

I should probably say from the outset that this isn’t going to be one of those essays lamenting the existence of TikTok or insisting that social media is destroying civilisation, because I still use both TikTok and Instagram Reels almost every day. I’ve discovered books through them, found creators I genuinely enjoy and laughed at videos I would never have encountered otherwise. If anything, I’m writing this because I recognise myself in the very behaviour I’m questioning, and because I suspect I’m far from the only person who has noticed that sitting with one thing for an extended period of time has become surprisingly difficult.

It seems to me that we’ve become incredibly efficient at consuming fragments. We watch clips from interviews rather than the interviews themselves, we read carousels summarising essays we never quite get around to opening, we listen to the thirty-second excerpt of a podcast that circulates on social media and somehow convince ourselves we’ve absorbed the conversation in full. Even YouTube, a platform that once rewarded creators for taking their time, now encourages shorts that disappear almost as quickly as they appear, whilst films, books and television series are increasingly judged by how quickly they “get good”, as though every piece of culture now has only a few moments to persuade us not to swipe away.

The more I thought about it, however, the more I realised that perhaps the problem isn’t really the death of long-form content at all. There are still brilliant podcasts lasting two hours, thoughtful YouTube essays, beautifully written long reads and novels that refuse to rush themselves. If anything has changed, it may be us. We’ve become so accustomed to consuming information in increasingly smaller pieces that remaining with a single idea for an hour can sometimes feel like an achievement rather than something entirely ordinary.

As someone who studied language, I can’t help wondering whether this reaches beyond the way we consume media. Conversation itself requires patience. People pause to think, stories take detours, interesting ideas often emerge halfway through rather than at the beginning, and some of the most memorable discussions I’ve ever had have wandered so far from where they started that neither person could have predicted where they would end. Yet so much of our online experience rewards the opposite. We skip ahead, summarise, condense and optimise until it sometimes feels as though we’ve become uncomfortable with anything that unfolds at its own pace.

What’s perhaps most ironic is that I don’t think this has made me enjoy culture more. Over the past few months I’ve found myself making a conscious effort to return to longer forms of media, not because I think they’re inherently superior, but because I’d started to miss them. I’ve been watching YouTube videos that last forty minutes without simultaneously scrolling through something else, listening to podcasts whilst tidying my office instead of abandoning them after fifteen minutes, and allowing albums to unfold from beginning to end rather than jumping immediately to the songs everyone else has already declared favourites. None of these things feel particularly remarkable, yet they’ve reminded me that there is a different kind of satisfaction in giving something your undivided attention, one that simply can’t be replicated by endlessly moving from one clip to the next.

Perhaps that’s why I’m reluctant to blame short-form content itself. The issue isn’t that these platforms exist, nor that they’re incapable of introducing us to genuinely fascinating ideas. More often than not, they’re the reason I discover a new book, podcast or creator in the first place. The problem begins when discovery quietly replaces depth, when the trailer becomes a substitute for the film, the quotation replaces the essay and the highlight becomes more familiar than the work from which it came.

I’ve started to wonder whether attention is less like a personality trait and more like a muscle. For years I assumed I’d somehow lost mine, when in reality I may simply have stopped asking very much of it. The more time I spend reading without checking my phone, finishing podcasts that don’t immediately demand my attention or allowing conversations to unfold without feeling the need to interrupt the silence, the more it feels as though that capacity was never gone at all. It had simply become accustomed to shorter distances.

Perhaps the death of long-form content isn’t really the story we’re living through. Perhaps long-form content has been there all along, patiently waiting for us to meet it where it has always been, whilst we’ve quietly forgotten that some of life’s richest experiences, whether they’re books, conversations, films or simply an afternoon spent listening carefully, have never been designed to reveal everything they have to offer within the first thirty seconds.