I really thought I’d nailed it the other night. I used to watch a movie on my laptop every Sunday evening, as a way to gently put the week to sleep, then I stopped, but I was convinced I’d find a way to start again. All I needed was subtitles. I bought Good Bye, Lenin! and got ready to watch Daniel Brühl lovingly trick his mother into thinking the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen. I was excited.
It didn’t work. Within half an hour, I’d paused the movie to look at my phone. My whole scheme had failed: the bet I’d made was that watching a movie in a foreign language would force me to focus, and stop me from wanting to check my various social media apps. It was a solid idea, but it didn’t go anywhere. In the end, I watched Good Bye, Lenin! bit by bit, unable to care about the story for more than around 20 minutes at a time.
It was infuriating, but I wasn’t that surprised – merely disappointed. Something shifted in me earlier this year, and I just can’t meaningfully consume media on a computer or a phone anymore. I couldn’t really tell you when it happened. I only clocked it once it was too late. There was a time, not too long ago, when I could watch movies and read lengthy features without getting too distracted, but no longer.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on culture in general; far from it. What I do instead is split my life between online and offline. The former, these days, is where work, chats and doomscrolling happen. I pick up my phone or computer and I gaze at slop, and I talk to my friends, and I write my pieces, then I put it down again. For everything else, there’s the latter.
We’re halfway through the year and, already, I’ve been to the cinema 11 times. I’ve been to see recent releases – A Real Pain, Thunderbolts – and older movies being shown again by places like the Prince Charles, in central London. I’d missed Interstellar when it came out back in 2014 but finally saw it a few months ago. It really is as good as people said it was.
In that time, I’ve also finished 24 books, and started but abandoned seven or eight more. I’ve read fiction and non-fiction; silly little books and long, poignant ones. I think 2025 may end up being my most prolific year ever in that department, assuming I keep going at the same pace.
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I quit vaping eight days and 12 minutes ago
I don’t quite have the same discipline when it comes to the press, but I’ve had my moments. A few weeks ago, I bought the Economist at the airport and spent a full 90 minutes reading it from cover to cover on my flight. It was hugely enjoyable, and I came out of it feeling both better informed and suitably entertained.
There is a world in which all of this is good news. I could continue this column by arguing that I have, despite everything, found a real sweet spot for myself. The internet tried to kill my attention span and my various interests but it failed. In time, I realised that the only winning move was not to play. I quit, and got my life back.
The only problem, really, is that most of my livelihood depends on as few people as possible doing what I did. I’ve been a journalist for a dozen years, to the month, and aside from a year and a half in the mid-2010s, when I worked for the Evening Standard, the majority of my work has been published online.
I do have this column, which you may well be reading in a physical newspaper, but practically everything else I write can be found on the internet, and the internet only. Assuming that my attention span isn’t the only one which has been left for dead by social media, what is the rest of my career going to look like?
I dearly enjoy writing and reporting, but it seems unlikely that the print industry will bounce back to the extent that we will somehow return to a wholly pre-digital world. I saw my growing inability to focus on things I was once able to enjoy, and I decided to do something about it, but how many people will do the same? How many will just keep scrolling through TikTok instead?
My internet focused on the written world and that suited me, both as someone who enjoyed publishing words and reading them. This new internet isn’t my own, and the part of me which acts as an audience is, finally, coming up with ways to keep consuming media in a way that feels enriching. The part of me which needs to pay rent is still stuck online, though, and is reliant on others to stay there too.
How’s that for a paradox? Do as I say, not as I do! No, really, please do – at least until I’ve figured something else out. Thank you.
