The Demolishment of Attention Span

The youth nowadays can never in a million years imagine how life was like a few decades ago for their grandparents who spent their entire lifetime without social media. They cannot comprehend or visualize how free time was spent in the old days, how connections were built or how people stayed in contact with each other. Always having a phone in hand and looking at the world from a small screen has definitely resulted in continuous dopamine spikes and loss of attention span.

People look at one incident online, raise their voice on its current outrage and move on in a few weeks or perhaps even days. This cycle was demonstrated this year when the Department Of Justice released the copies of the Epstein files. Social media was drawing headlines about all the horrendous evils that were seen being documented while all the influencers, public figures and news channels were reporting about it as well as numerous protests being conducted. However, within a month out of nowhere the USA and Iran war erupted along with the martyrdom of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah. Suddenly people totally forgot about the women and children assaulted in the files.

In September of 2026, the Epstein files were no longer to be heard of. The whole world knows what happened, nonetheless their attention span has shifted onto something else. This proves that social media was indeed designed and created to turn its users into machines without a sense or purpose of their own, as if whatever crimes they commit, people will tend to forget and even forgive.

The loss of attention span is also significantly visible in our daily routines. The need for online studying is rising, however whenever students try to study online they end up scrolling reels on instagram or tiktok and lose track of what they were doing in the first place. This neglectful nature is what social media helps develop, which is increasingly rising in children below the ages of 13 resulting in their brains never developing properly.

Governments around the world are slowly banning and restricting social media for children under the ages of 16 in hope to reduce the exploitation they face especially the ones without parents supervision, However it seems that this ban is placed far too late and due to new AI technology and social media addiction, under 16 teenagers would easily get past this law and use it anyways through other means. Moreover, social media is now more of a commercial hub rather than an app to use for fun. Large corporations who own them cannot afford to lose a major part of their customer base and the governments are well aware of this. They are definitely not considerate about the emotional development of children.

Parents are also seemingly adapting to this new digital world rather than imposing restrictions on their young children. The majority of them have of course unintentionally failed their part of grooming their children properly. Along with all this the autism rates have drastically increased which many point fingers on the use of the internet. Thus, the hope of ever recovering from such an evolution is slowly dying whilst the thinking capabilities of young minds get wasted on such activities, making them emotionally unaware and incapable of ever getting a mental rest.