Attention Is the Last Freedom

Write like civilization depends on it — because it does.

We are living in an age where attention is a currency, a moral substance, and increasingly, a casualty. Every device in your pocket, every scroll, every notification, is a tiny predator, consuming the finite neurons in your skull and leaving you, incrementally, a less capable human being. And this is not hyperbole: it is literal, measurable, and devastating.

The problem isn’t that people don’t read anymore. They do. Constantly. All day every day, they read tweets, emails, texts, headlines, captions, comments, Reddit threads, Netflix subtitles. The problem is that none of this is reading in the sense of sustained, effortful, serious attention. We are literate, but not attentive. Saturated, but not nourished. Trained not to think, but to react.

Everyone’s always asking, “Why aren’t young men reading literature?” This is followed by rather hamfisted attempts at solutions, such as “We just need to make it more accessible.” And by “accessible,” they mean dumbing it down and diluting the quality of the material.

Let me start off by debunking the myth that young men have abandoned literature. They’re reading. They’re just reading fiction that was published at least 40-50 years ago. Some of them are listening to Nietzsche and Socrates on Audible, between podcasts by Theo Von and Joe Rogan. It’s not so much that modern literature is too dense, but more that it doesn’t speak to the average person.

What does a warehouse worker have in common with an Ivy League MFA? There’s no shared life experience there to really connect with. If you can only write honestly about what you know, then you need to know the things that matter most to your audience. You have to experience what it’s like to wrestle with addiction, divorce, custody battles, homelessness, heartbreak, and the grind of a job that breaks your body and soul while barely paying your rent if you want to capture anything of substance for the working-class Americans you claim to want to get back into engaging with the arts.

Young men aren’t buying what the Big Five are selling, because all of it is written at them instead of for them. Why spend $20 on a book that says “You’re the villain,” and blames you for all of society’s failings? This is why the vast majority of tradpub’s debut novels are selling less than 5,000 copies, while half the population spends their lives perpetually transfixed by 15-second lip sync videos.

When America collapses, and it’s collapsing in slow motion right now, it won’t be because of nukes or famine. It will be because our collective attention span shrank below the threshold necessary to maintain self-government, empathy, or even basic sanity.

Literature is not quaint nostalgia. It is a technology of survival. And this is our Hail Mary.

Imagine, if you will, the collective human nervous system — yours, mine, the guy three rows up in Starbucks who is not reading but sort of hunched over two devices simultaneously — being rewired on a minute-to-minute basis by companies whose explicit business model is to monetize our flickers of attention.

And when I say “attention” I don’t mean the noble, cathedral-like attention that scribes and monks and maybe your grandmother once exercised in the careful shelling of peas on a hot porch in Indiana. I mean the twitchy, Pavlovian reflex that gets hijacked whenever a screen lights up with the promise of something. Ding. Buzz. Scroll. Swipe. And repeat.

It’s probably not news to you. You, right now, already feeling the itch to skim this very paragraph because it’s going on too long, isn’t it? The average human attention span is now clocked by the Microsofts of the world at roughly eight seconds, which is less than a goldfish, though I’m fairly sure goldfish are spared the indignity of pop-up ads promising cures for baldness and erectile dysfunction. This isn’t just a quirk. It’s the systemic collapse of our species’ most basic cognitive muscle, the thing that allows us to finish novels, think critically, and, incidentally, love one another without checking our phones mid-embrace.

Whole swaths of contemporary life are now structured to disintegrate our capacity for focused thought. Universities (yes, those temples of “higher learning”) teach students not to analyze but to regurgitate bullet points. Corporations encourage “multitasking” (read: doing three jobs half-assedly instead of one well). Political discourse has compressed itself to memes with text so large and blunt it might as well be skywriting. The economy, and here I really mean the whole thing, increasingly depends on our inability to just sit still with a single object of thought.

Which is why, of course, reading a book is now tantamount to an act of civil disobedience. Because, unlike the infinite-scroll feed, the book ends. It demands patience. It resists monetization. A novel, especially a long one, is a cruel, stubborn thing that says: No, you will not be rewarded with a dopamine squirt after every three seconds. You will suffer ambiguity, endure boredom, and confront silence. Because those very states — ambiguity, boredom, silence — are the actual prerequisites of any meaningful culture.

We’ve built a civilization allergic to its own survival tools.

And maybe this sounds alarmist. Maybe you want me to cite another study. Maybe you want a nice graph that’s skewed a bit more optimistic. But the more essential, more alarming fact is: there will be no studies in a society that cannot attend long enough to produce them. There will be no graphs once nobody can read them. What collapses first is not democracy, not capitalism, not even the ice caps, but attention itself, the invisible infrastructure of every other human project.

The tragedy of all this is not just that you can’t finish Middlemarch anymore, or that your kid will never know the bittersweet masochism of making it through 900 pages of Infinite Jest and wondering whether it was worth it. It’s that once you strip a person’s capacity for attention, you eliminate their capacity for choice.

Because choice, and I’m talking about real choice, not the curated illusion of thirty brands of toothpaste, requires that you can hold competing options in your mind at once, weigh them, and live in their dissonance long enough to make an informed decision. When attention collapses, so does judgment. Without judgment, there’s only impulse. Without impulse control, there’s only addiction. And a culture of addicts isn’t a culture at all; it’s just a feedlot.

The easiest way to confuse a person is to give them too much information. To overwhelm them with endless choices without consequence.

Before nations fall, attention falls. Empires don’t end because the barbarians kick in the gates. Empires end because their citizens are too distracted to notice they’re already open and the guards are asleep.

So yes, we are drowning in information, in “content,” in pixels and slogans and streaming seasons that never resolve, but we are starving for attention. And starving people, history shows us, will eat anything. Including each other.

That’s the first principle of this so-called renaissance: before we save books, before we save the Republic, before we save the human race, we have to save attention. Because attention is just another word for the soul.

The body rots when it doesn’t move. Everyone knows this, even if most of us prefer not to. We keep Fitbits on our wrists and shame in our bellies because we know, in some primitive animal way, that sedentary equals sick. Yet somehow the exact same principle which governs the body is treated as a metaphor when it comes to the mind.

Reading is not a metaphorical exercise. It’s actual exercise. Attention, the act of sustained focus, is a capacity. And capacities can atrophy. Or they can be trained.

What follows isn’t another “lifehack.” It’s not about skimming faster or learning to speed-read your way through 10,000 words an hour so you can flex about it on LinkedIn. This is about slow strength. Reading as resistance training. You want an attention span worthy of civilization? You have to earn it.

---

Every day, carve out one hour. Phone off. Notifications off. Ideally, lock the phone in a drawer like it’s a cursed artifact that corrodes your nervous system. One book, one chair, one hour. No skipping to “just check” a text. If your skin starts to itch and you feel a phantom vibration in your thigh, congratulations — that’s withdrawal. Stay with it.

In the first week, you’ll fidget. You’ll reread the same paragraph. You’ll suddenly remember seventeen urgent things you forgot to do. Ignore them. The goal isn’t to finish chapters, it’s to reclaim your own nervous system. Attention is a territory. Guard it like a border.

Bring a pencil. Underline. Scrawl in the margins. Draw furious arrows. Argue with the author like they can hear you. Annotation is proof you were there, the reader’s graffiti, an act of ownership over the text.

The margins aren’t just there for aesthetic, they’re blank in order to facilitate dialogue between the reader and the work itself. It’s there that passive reading becomes genuine engagement. Where questions, doubts, and sparks of recognition take root. The white space invites interruption, commentary, even argument. Without it, the text speaks at you. With it, as a partner in the pursuit of greater understanding.

When you mark a book, you build a second nervous system outside your body, a trail of thought you can return to later. The annotations become weight plates. Every note is a rep.

Keep a journal. Each day after reading, write one page in longhand about what you read. Not a summary, not a school report. Just what grabbed you, what disturbed you, what made you laugh. The act of transcribing thought to page is how the text metabolizes into something more useful than merely hearing the words in your head and then almost immediately forgetting them.

This is also the checkpoint. If you can’t fill one page without glancing at your phone, you failed the set. Start again tomorrow. No shame, just more reps.

Every month, pick one book you’ve already read and go back through it. Slowly. Like revisiting a trail you thought you knew, but is different in autumn light. Rereading isn’t redundant, it’s hypertrophy. The first read is endurance, the second builds depth. Muscles don’t grow on novelty alone, they grow on repetition under strain. So does comprehension.

Occasionally, pick a “hard” book. Dense. Annoying. Maybe even boring. Push through. Don’t skim. The difficulty is the weight, struggle is the point. Your reward isn’t pleasure but resilience. The stamina to remain in the solitude of someone else’s mind, even when it doesn’t entertain you.

After three months of this, you’ll notice something: conversations feel slower, in a good way. You’ll resist the urge to check your phone every ten minutes. Your dreams will get stranger. You’ll start to remember what you read. In other words, you’ll have reclaimed some sovereignty over your mind.

That mental sovereignty, the ability to direct and sustain attention, is all that separates a citizen from a subject, a free man from a slave. The Reader’s Gym is not self-help. It’s self-defense.

The point is to make reading feel physical, like sweat and soreness, so it reclaims urgency in a culture that treats it as a hobby. To make the act of reading a civic ritual.

Reading has always been sold as a solitary act. The child alone in bed with a flashlight. The scholar hunched over a stack of books in a dim library. The commuter on a train, head bowed into a paperback like he’s praying for meaning. And yes, solitude is essential. But civilization is not built in solitude. It’s built in the company of others, in the relationships between people with shared values and a shared vision for the future.

One of the cruelest tricks of the attention economy is how it convinces us that scrolling through feeds counts as connection and togetherness. Comment sections are not community. Likes are not love. If anything, they amplify the loneliness, each one a reminder that actual conversation is being replaced by noise.

The survival of reading depends on dragging it back into the public square. Not book clubs in the Oprah sense — “What did you like about the protagonist?” — but encounters. Shared attention. A table where people read the same difficult thing, together, then argue, grieve, laugh, or simply sit with the weight of it all in silence.

Maybe that looks like six people in a living room, no phones. One book. A kitchen timer set to 45 minutes. Everyone reads silently, in the same room. The timer goes off. Then comes discussion. Not a summary, not “what page are you on?” but raw impressions: Why did this sentence punch you in the gut? Why did this paragraph make you angry?

This is the antidote to feedlot culture: human beings metabolizing meaningful words together. Frontporch fellowship.

The trick is to strip away the hobbyist vibe. No wine-and-cheese charcuterie boards, no Instagrammable stacks of books. Treat it like a rite. Maybe even light a candle at the start, or put the phones in a lockbox. The gravity matters. When reading is framed as sacred, people take it more seriously.

Communal reading is older than literacy itself. Oral poetry, scripture recited aloud, folktales by firelight. What we’re reviving isn’t new. It’s memory.

There’s a reason armies drill together, not alone. A reason religious services gather bodies under one roof. Discipline is easier in the company of others, where we can receive support and accountability, the twin pillars of growth.

When you share literature with others, you borrow their eyes. You notice what they notice. You see how their perspective shapes what they take away from a story. This is how you come to understand someone who sees the world differently.

So the next time you pick up a book, don’t just ask, What will I get from this? Ask, Who can I bring into this with me? Because the book alone saves no one. The book shared saves us all.

Writers are not exempt. In fact, they’re probably the most compromised of all. Because while readers are preyed upon by distraction, writers are bribed by it. The temptation to make the work more “digestible,” more “shareable,” more “accessible” — i.e., engineered to be skimmed — is everywhere.

The publishing industry wants shorter sentences, fewer commas, punchier openings. Online platforms demand “hooks” that snatch the reader in the first eight seconds, because otherwise the algorithm will bury the piece under an avalanche of TikTok dances. Even the literary outlets are infected, formatting essays into bullet-point lists, bold pull quotes, numbered subheadings, all the little prosthetics meant to compensate for an audience whose attention span has already been amputated.

Herein lies the paradox: the more writers contort themselves to fit this model, the more irrelevant literature becomes. Because you cannot out-feed the feed. You cannot write “content” into eternity and expect it to be remembered.

If literature is going to matter, to stand as any kind of antidote, it has to be everything the feed is not.

One way is to deliberately resist smoothness. Long sentences. Hard words. Tangents. The willingness to force the reader to slow down, stumble, and reread. In other words, friction. Friction is not the enemy of attention. Friction creates attention.

Think of David Foster Wallace’s footnotes, Pynchon’s digressions, Faulkner’s labyrinthine syntax. These weren’t selfish indulgences. They were defensive architecture, scaffolding designed to make skimming impossible. To read them at all, you had to surrender. That surrender is the whole point.

Writers in the age of distraction need to treat form itself as resistance. Refuse the tyranny of “content.” Refuse the packaging that makes literature indistinguishable from an email newsletter. Write pieces that can’t be excerpted without breaking. Books that don’t lend themselves to sound bites.

The test is simple: if your work can be reduced to a tweet, you’ve already lost.

Another weapon: slowness. Whole pages that seem to stall, descriptions that linger beyond comfort. Silence in prose is like negative space in art — it forces the eye to dwell. The feed is all noise. Literature must dare to be profoundly quiet.

Writers must remember: every sentence they put into the world either contributes to attention or erodes it. Write to strengthen the reader’s muscle, not weaken it. Give them ambiguity, give them contradiction, give them too much. Because “too much” is exactly what’s needed for growth.

This doesn’t mean being obscure for obscurity’s sake. It means refusing to dilute. Refusing to write like you’re afraid of being abandoned. Because if you’re writing truth, the right readers will stay. And staying is the entire battle.

The distracted writer produces distracted readers, and distracted readers produce a distracted society. This is not just aesthetics. It’s survival.

So here’s the line in the sand: if you are writing in 2025 and beyond, your obligation is not to be popular. Your obligation is to be necessary. Write something that hurts to ignore. Something that resists being skimmed. Something that demands to be read with the same kind of attention you want to see returned to the culture.

In other words, if you want to write in the age of distraction, you must write like distraction is the enemy. Because it is.

Every renaissance begins as a counter-culture.
Every counter-culture begins as a refusal.

The hippies refused war. The punks refused suburbia. The hackers refused authority. And if there’s going to be a literary renaissance in the twenty-first century, it will start with people refusing distraction.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s not about wallpapering the culture with sepia-toned posters of Hemingway, not about re-enacting Bloomsbury salons with Instagram filters. It’s about recognizing that in a civilization built on engineered addiction, the simple act of directing your own attention is radical. A deep reader is the new outlaw.

To sit down with a long book, in silence, with no device in reach, is to reject the economy’s prime directive: consume constantly. When you pick a 700-page novel over a feed, you’re not just entertaining yourself — you’re seceding. You’re unplugging your nervous system from the Matrix.

That’s the seed of counter-culture. Not clothes or slogans, but discipline.

In the Soviet Union, “samizdat” meant banned books copied and passed around by dissidents, usually in the form of cheap carbon paper smudged with fingerprints. Today, it might mean a PDF emailed between friends, or a Word doc smuggled through Discord channels, or a self-published ‘zine that doesn’t care about monetization or algorithms.

The point is not legality. The point is intimacy. A culture of attention grows best in underground networks — unpolished, unmonetized, unoptimized.

Because every time literature becomes “content,” it dies.

Keep it raw. Keep it human.

The point isn’t to market reading back to the masses. The point is to keep alive a space where deep reading still means something, so when the masses finally tire of the dopamine slot machine, there’s somewhere real to come back to.

It won’t be big. It’s not supposed to be. You don’t need millions of converts. You need a vanguard. A few thousand serious readers scattered across the country, connected by a genuine passion for the art, holding the line until the rest of the culture realizes what it’s lost.

Every civilization has a hinge moment. Rome had the Visigoths. Europe had the Plague. America had 9/11. These are the obvious ones, the events you can circle on a timeline. But sometimes the hinge isn’t visible. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes it’s the sound of millions of minds flicking away from thought, a collective left swipe across the screen of history.

That’s where we are.

The decline of attention won’t make headlines. It won’t be reported like a war or pandemic. It will look like background noise. A thousand tiny shifts in how we speak, think, love. It will look like parents too distracted to raise children, like citizens too distracted to vote responsibly, like leaders too distracted to govern. The collapse will look like entertainment.

And here’s the grim symmetry: the same civilization that can split atoms and edit genomes cannot hold still long enough to finish a book. That’s the joke. That’s the tragedy.

Attention is the soul…and the soul is worth fighting for.