Explore the Attention Spans and Gain the Mental Health

By the time you have finished reading this sentence; your attention may already have started to
wander, according to the latest statistics on attention-deficit. The average attention-span in 2013
was just 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000, and less than that of a goldfish, at 9 seconds.
Still with me? Good. Lets swim outside the goldfish bowl for a few moments to explore why our
attention spans are decreasing and, more importantly, what effect this is having on how we find
meaning in our lives.
We are living in an age where our attention is under siege. There are more organizations competing
for our attention than ever before. In 2012, 984 billion dollars were spent globally on marketing, via
ever more invasive channels. In only the last 20-30 years, we have gone from having only a handful
of primary lines of communication (e.g. speaking in person, writing letters, home landlines, print
media), to being spliced opened to influence, through a suffocating complex of social media
channels, social networking tools, multiple email addresses, 300+ TV channels.
This rapid growth of communication channels is accelerating our dependence on instant
gratification, quick fix modes of being. We expect everything to be instantly accessible, at our
fingertips or in our pocket. A recent Pew Internet study showed that college students had less
patience than their predecessors, whilst their willingness to engage with in-depth analysis had also
decreased. In the words of eminent psychologist Daniel Goleman, we are ever more seduced by
distraction.
And in this bullish market for our attention, those marketers trying to seduce us towards their
products and services have to find ever more innovative ways to capture our attention, in ever
shorter bursts of time. This intense competition to influence our minds is seriously affecting our
mental health, most alarmingly that of our kids. In 2011, 11% of American school-aged children were
diagnosed with ADHD, whilst in Britain ADHD has been cited as the most common behavioural
problem in schools, affecting between 3 and 9% of schoolchildren. Divide (our attention) and
conquer, you might say.
In some ways, we can imagine life was simpler in the past. Traditional social and religious structures
emerged partly to provide a solid framework (a sacred canopy as sociologist Peter Berger describes
it) within which humans could find and sustain meaning, a moral fabric through which people would
weave their decisions. For some, the only book they would ever have had access to would have been
the core religious text of their culture: Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita, etc. Even if they could not read,
there would have been a much-reduced menu of values, assumptions, and beliefs about how to live
life. At the root of this simplicity was often a different concept of time: not the linear, onwards and
upwards march of progress of the Modern world, but a cyclical understanding of time and the
cosmos, which historian Mircea Eliade describes thus: The cosmos is conceived [of] as a living unity
that is born, develops, and dies on the last day of the year, to be reborn on New Year's Day. [...] At
every New Year, time begins ab initio as continual present. There was simplicity and humility in
these cyclical belief structures that is truly hard to imagine now.

In our day, these sorts of traditional frameworks of belief are on the decline in much of the world.
There are many reasons given for their decline; too many to go into full detail here. I will just briefly
describe three such reasons that are relevant to our discussion here. For one, the power structures
that were built around traditional and religious beliefs were often revealed to be ultimately
oppressive, not progressive. Often, if you disagreed with the status quo you would be excluded or
exterminated. Also, as science has climbed up to an ever more powerful global position, traditional
and religious beliefs have been discarded by many as just beliefs, by their very nature unscientific,
and so all value has been bleached out from them. I would like to suggest a third important reason
here: that in our distracted, attention-deficit age, the discipline and commitment required by
traditional and religious structures and practices has become far more difficult to attain, as our
minds are pulled in an ever more complex tug-of-war.
However, whilst religion may well be on the decline, the inherent need for meaning in our lives
certainly isnt.
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who wrote the seminal book Mans Search for Meaning, after
surviving 3 years in that darkest manifestation of scientific progressivism, the concentration camp
at Auschwitz. His most profound realization came when, even in the darkest pits of despair, both he
and his fellow inmates still found them actively, unrelentingly searching for meaning. Thus, having
survived this ordeal, both physically and psychologically survived, he came to the conclusion,
expressed so beautifully in this most lucid one-liner:
Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.
Read more about Lost souls swimming in a fish bowl written by a male chid psychotherapist, Louis
Weinstock. Also to know more visit Louis Weinstock.