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Attention Spans and Spiritual Diets in the 21st Century

Stephen C

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I ran across the below photo of the multilingual story hours that public libraries used to put on for immigrant communities (the below is of Italian children listening to Pinocchio). As a father of fashionably attention-deficit sons, I was immediately struck by how rapt the young children’s attention was to the teacher. With kids these days a basic Pinocchio storyline would barely muster any interest.

On one hand, we can stop pretending that The Iliad is objectively exciting reading (yeah, I said it). The craft of storytelling is much more honed and developed because it has to compete with so much else out there. On his show Bill Maher made the insightful point that when he started in the entertainment business your competitor was whoever happened to be on the television at the same time, whereas now when you produce content you are literally competing against everything that has ever been made, so if you’re going to put a creative product out in the world, it has to compete against The Godfather, Stairway to Heaven, and Harry Potter.

(Earlier this year my family stayed in a hotel on a cross-country trip. When we put the TV on for the kids they quickly bored of what was on and asked for Paw Patrol or something, and we had to explain that no, with a TV you had to just watch what was on—”oh, like when you were a kid.”)

In his book Planet Funny Ken Jennings talks at length about how with the rise of Twitter the appetite for funny content is insatiable because we habituate so fast to funny stimulus, and on his podcast he pined for a time when you were actually surprised by the classic horror tropes like He Was Dead The Whole Time! that has been recycled so many millions of times the effect has worn off like a injecting-in-the-vein heroin addict smoking opium.

Probably the greatest musical experience of my life was on my mission when, after having gone for over a year without listening to something other than Mormon Tabernacle Choir (gosh how I still hate them. I mean, carrots are fine and healthy, but when you’re only allowed to eat carrots for two years you never want to touch them again), I found myself in the middle of a Spanish plaza at night with Linkin Park playing on large speakers, and I feel like I finally grasped a little bit of the feeling that music obsessives feel. But it took a year of zen-like non-stimulation to get to that point. (One of the most moving accounts of this phenomenon is the story of a solitary confinement prisoner in Argentina’s “Dirty War” who saw a fellow human eye after a long stretch with no human contact. It’s maybe a two pages long, so too long to paste, but it’s the account titled “Eye” here).

So yes, this is another one of those gripes about how kids these days (and increasingly parents) can’t focus anymore or appreciate anything in-depth because of the deluge of material. But I’m of two minds. On one hand our children have access to exponentially more content: uplifting content, stimulating content, depressing content, gross content. If you are what you eat diet-wise: whereas our ancestors could get the occasional berry by the stream, now we have an all-you-can-eat buffet of inspirational material.

On the other hand, there’s a certain superficiality you get from scrolling and YouTube shorts that you don’t get from long-form meditation and prayer. So on the one hand I love the community and ritual afforded by church and don’t think that it should be replaced by streaming or scrolling, but still, it’s naïve to think that with our children early morning seminary and 2 hours on Sunday can begin to compete with hours of scrolling content in terms of personal influence.

On the other hand, “back in my day” if you wanted to get up to date on something you had to drive down to a library and hope that the book you wanted wasn’t checked out, whereas now anybody can get the cutting edge take on just about anything. Want to listen to all the General Conferences ever? Easy enough to do. Have a difficult gospel issue you want to get to the bottom of? You can access the criticisms, apologetics responses, critical responses to the apologists, the far-out theories, the most recent evidence. Want to listen to dozens of different variations of your favorite hymn? Easy peasy.

So we devout religionists have to play and be adept at both games. We should keep the temple trips, multi-hour family viewings of The Ten Commandments, and deep scriptural study, while also providing 30-second, high production value clips that can compete in today’s attention landscape. Yes, the YouTube shorts can’t get us to heaven by themselves, but that is where people are at, and self-righteousness about short form versus long form content isn’t going to help anybody. Yes, there are things about the gospel you’re not going to grasp in 30 seconds, but that doesn’t meant that the 30-secon window is impenetrable by the light of the gospel.

Comments

11 responses to “Attention Spans and Spiritual Diets in the 21st Century”

  1. ji

    In other words, we need to be realistic and meet people where they are. I agree.

  2. E

    I agree with your points. I’m smiling at your memory of being restricted to listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Halfway through my mission our MP finished his service and we got a new one who imposed the same music restriction so we went from a mission rule that allowed us to listen to anything sold at Deseret Book to MoTab only. I, the most hardworking and obedient missionary ever, could not do it for long. I also recall the mission president’s wife driving us somewhere and she would listen to pop music on the radio. I loved being with her.

  3. jader3rd

    I liked reading the Iliad. It probably helped that I read it as part of a class where the instructor would help point out the larger picture that I was probably missing as I read it. But I liked it so much that after I graduated I bought myself a new copy and read it again.

  4. Anon

    I don’t think we can downplay the dangers of a diet of digital “short forms”. That stuff is like processed food. It definitely lowers your spiritual life expectancy.

  5. Chad Nielsen

    “Mormon Tabernacle Choir (gosh how I still hate them.)”

    On the one hand, I understand getting sick of them from too much exposure. On the other hand, I feel like I need to feel mortally offended as a member of the Choir org.

  6. Stephen C

    Lol, I should have said “how much I hate *the music*, making sure I separated the handbell wheat from the choir tares ;) But seriously, I wonder what it would be like to have not grown up with it always playing in the background on Sunday and to just walk into a MoTab rehearsal without having ever been exposed to it.

  7. John Mansfield

    I was born in 1966, and so was seven in 1973. Now and then I would take home from the school library some thick yet age-appropriate story book from before 1950. The book may have been no older than Harry Potter is now, but it was from the before-times when seven year olds did not watch re-runs of Bonanza, Gilligan’s Island, and Star Trek in the afternoon. I did not know about the divide then, but as an adult it made sense of something like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, a book I remember as just going on and on and on as if the child reading it had nothing else to do that hour.

    So, I guess I should have sympathy with today’s children and youth and the point made above.

  8. Sterling

    Two days ago someone posted on X:

    “We created gyms because modern day work no longer required physical activity. Without exercise, our muscles atrophy.

    I predict we’ll need gyms for our brains too, once AI starts doing our knowledge work.”

    On Bluesky, there were a few responses:

    “the tech industry is about to invent books,” one said.

    “Hear me out … We call it ‘The University,’” said another.

  9. Jonathan Green

    If nothing else, 25-minute lessons are a better fit for the average current attention span. You even get a quick break in the middle to stand up and take a short walk.

  10. rogerdhansen

    Many things in the world today are too long, way too long. For example, most 3-hr movies, John Dehlin interviews, many books, TV series, etc. They get repetitive.

    Mormon church services are boring. General Conference is boring. Some try to blame this on members for their lack of concentration. But life is too short to waste time on unproductive activities. Meetings lack creativity. Redundant and repetitive messages. Recycled material. MoTab music is frequently dreary.

    Instead of bemoaning short attention spans, we need to readily accept that it is reality. That increasingly members expect more with less beating around the bush.

    The development of new technologies is accelerating. We need to evolve with it. New technologies give us incredible opportunities. We need to use them productively.

    I would like to hear Jackie DeShannon’s “Think of your Fellow Man” in church. While the song dates from the 60’s, hearing an upbeat song in church with a positive message would be innovative.

  11. Lion of the Lord

    I think Anon and Roger D. Hansen bring up needed discussion points. Most short form content is not good for our spiritual well-being. On the other hand, I also think Roger is right, too many books and movies these days are too long, way too long.

    Some might get upset here, but that’s partly why I don’t like Brandon Sanderson anymore. Most of his books have become way too long and repetitive, both in messaging and characters. Personally, I felt that many of his female characters were just variations of Vin, who I deeply loved, but it became boring more or less reading the same story.

    Stephen:

    To push back gently, if you don’t find The Iliad to be exciting reading, the same can be said of the Standard Works. I’m mainly speaking about the OT and BofM, but the NT and D&C aren’t that much better. Objectively speaking, one could argue that The Iliad is more exciting than all of our Holy Writ, because it has a fairly tight narrative, etc.

    What I’m getting at, and you touch upon it in your post, is that there are things more important than just being “exciting”. If we’re being honest, most of the Great Books, both in the East and West aren’t all that exciting. However, the vast majority of them are deeply spiritual or philosophically important to the development of our civilization.

    I would argue that this constant need/search for excitement is spiritually damning to our souls. I’m not going to argue that this is a uniquely modern problem, since sin, especially sexual, lives off of constantly needing new excitement.

    Put simply, we need to make Psalm 46:10 a part of our lives, especially within the temple:
    “Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.”

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