Social Commentary

You Probably Won’t Finish This Article, and That’s What I Am Writing About

I Spent Years Writing Articles No One Read. The Reason Surprised Me.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

We Don’t Finish Things Anymore

I’ve wanted to write this one for a long time, because it sits close to me. I’ve spent months writing on Medium, wrote so many articles, and most of them reach very few people. I used to wonder what I was doing wrong.

The title? The topic? The timing?

Then I noticed how I read other people’s work, and realised I skip the long ones too.

We skim articles longer than a minute. We bail on surveys after two minutes. We binge-watch shows while half-watching reels on our mobile phones. Somewhere between CNN and TikTok, we lost patience for anything slow — reading, writing, sitting with an idea. We’ve evolved a lot as a civilisation.

Now we have to learn how to untrain ourselves. We can do it, let me show you how.

Instant Everything

We live for instant gratification. If you’ve got wifi and a smartphone, you can pull up almost any answer in seconds. Having knowledge at your fingertips is helpful, but it also makes us impatient.

When everything comes in easily chewable bits, we slowly forget how to sit with something that takes more than a couple of minutes. Streaming services condition us to keep watching another episode instead of reading a book or thinking too much.

“I used to love reading sci-fi,” a friend told me recently. She still does, but over time her attention wandered to blog posts she could finish on her laptop. “I don’t have time to read 300-page books as I used to,” she explained.

She’s not lazy. She has just been trained like the rest of us have. We’ve trained ourselves to expect anything we search to appear instantly, so of course, our brains have adapted to work that way too. Instead of sitting with difficult concepts, we skim quickly and easily.

The Attention Economy

Businesses know this. Social media, streaming platforms and even your local news website all know exactly how to keep you clicking. Give them your attention for long enough, and they will make sure to never let go.

This isn’t a conspiracy; they just know that when you’re searching for something to watch, you’re far more likely to click on that sharp headline. They have trained the recommendation system that way.

Sure, it’s good for business. But what does it do to us? Humans have a limited amount of attention each day.

When our attention is being pulled in twenty directions, we get worse at giving it to just one thing. We don’t sit down to really examine an idea. We don’t read both sides before making a judgment. We take the quickest answer and leave.

Consider how we consume political news nowadays: most headlines scrolling past on X or Facebook, not the full story. Important topics don’t get the attention they deserve, and society, as a result, skews towards fake news spreading faster and honest discussion becoming more difficult. Without the time to sit with new ideas, real conversation is hard to come by.

Can we actually slow down?

Life is busy, and we’re all about quick fixes, but there are things you can do to train yourself otherwise:

• Read and write more often. Improving at anything starts with showing up. Carve out 15–20 minutes a day to read a longer article or finish a few pages of a book. Guard that time like you would anything else you care about. You don’t have to delete TikTok or swear off OTT, but do your best to balance out quick content with something slower and meaningful.
• Take actual breaks from screens. Technology these days is amazing, but it’s also a beautiful distraction. Take a few short breaks away from any screens and use them to read a book, journal, or just sit with your thoughts. Oftentimes, stepping away from the feed can clear your head better than scrolling through it.
• Create content you’d want to spend time with. If I had to choose between writing an interesting article or one that skimmed for views, you bet I would choose the former. Same opportunity and choice for you if you blog, make YouTube videos, or post on Instagram. Make work that grabs people’s attention, because enough good work is what actually shifts the culture.
• Surround yourself with people who take their time. Seek out friend groups or online or IRL (in real life) communities that value learning and real conversation. I am in LinkedIn groups (like, Silent Book Club) where people will actually hop into a long article and debate the points made rather than commenting on the headline. Goodreads is another great example. Surround yourself with people who ignore the noise, and you’ll find it easier to do the same.

Slow Down (On Purpose)

Pretty pessimistic?

Feel like that’s the world we’re stuck with? Don’t.

Sure, there’s plenty of culture you have to fight to access, but you can also find all sorts of good in that same phone if you know what you’re looking for.

Podcasts, online courses, slow, journalistically written articles… we could talk about all the good content being made right now all day. Instead, just remember that speed isn’t always better. Enjoying one second at a time isn’t always slowing down; it’s taking your time.

Further Reading (Boosted Post)

[embed]Be a Better Version of Yourself — Uninstall All Social Media Apps Today Let me show you how I'm thriving without them.medium.com