It’s harder than ever for us to pay attention, and that makes it harder than ever for anyone to get our attention.

Over years we slowly chipped it away at our attention spans, ironically with the very mechanisms we designed to get our attention in the first place. We trained our brains to expect a nudge, a ping or a red badge at random intervals, and the next one was never too far away.

Now AI has compounded the problem. Answers to anything are instant and summarised to within an inch of their truth (and sometimes beyond). Any idea we had for software is now reachable within the hour. Not a prototype, but the working app in production.

There’s no benefit in pausing, reflecting, or working out things the long, hard and stupid way anymore. That just means you’re getting leapfrogged, tokenmogged, ngmi bro.

We can’t read a paragraph without complaining it’s too many words. I’m happy for you, or sad that it happened. Hey Grok, is this true? We’ve outsourced our entire critical thinking faculty to an LLM owned by the world’s richest man.

It’s a grim outlook for anyone working in this space who feels the slightest bit uneasy about joining this race to the bottom and plumbing new depths of the attention economy. In fact, it’s the inattention economy now. How can you get the attention of someone, anyone, who has none to begin with?

Could you put out a classic Volkswagen ad today where copy took up 70% of the page? Yes, but your audience diminishes to chin-stroking weirdos who are reading to find holes. The rest of the world is waiting for a summary that misses the point and most of the context.

The outlook may be dismal, but joining them because you can’t beat them feels even worse. Make everything shorter, flashier, distill everything worth reflecting on into something that TikTok’s algorithm loves. It’s probably easier, but where does that leave us as a species?

I think it’s easy to dismiss this idea that we should have analog hobbies, read books, or visit the Library as anachronistic or nostalgic. And maybe that’s partially true. But it’s also about stopping our brains from deteriorating to a point where we’re depending solely on the short-form content filtered by a handful of billionaires to guide our life’s decisions because that’s all we can cognitively stomach.

I think all of this is worth pushing back against. There are lots of fights that are not worth fighting but this one feels like the difference between regaining our ability to sit with the same thought for longer than a minute or becoming Axiom Humans.

For the marketers in the room, this leaves us with two choices: carry on down this path of trying to game the inattention economy with ever-diminishing returns, or head in the opposite direction and zag at a time when zagging matters more than ever. The latter is less comfortable, less commercially successful, and less popular in the short-term. In the long term, it might just be what saves us.

In a world where everyone wants everything in its softest, chewiest, easiest-to-swallow form, it’s an act of defiance to roll out a complete meal.