Attention isn’t dying, it’s just waiting for something worthy.

I don’t agree. And I don’t think we should be complicit in it accepting this as “un fait accompli”, as creators or as audiences.

We live in an age where our attention is the product. Everything’s built to capture it, hold it, and sell it. The unintended consequence of this is short, shallow, transient content designed to hold our attention just long enough to secure an impression, before hooking you onto the next.

The Guardian recently reported that Netflix is asking writers to make dialogue more explicit so “viewers who are half-watching can keep up.” Half-watching. Half-listening. Half-feeling. This feels like a race to the bottom of attention spans. A slow erosion of everything that make’s storytelling great. To my mind that’s not creative strategy. To accept this is instead creative surrender; because when we write for distraction, we get distraction. When we design for the background, we fade into it.

And that my friends, is not a great place to be.

So here’s my take.

Attention isn’t dying; it’s just waiting for something worthy. People are still willing to sit in dark cinemas for hours, binge watch entire series over weekends, or give their full focus to educational content … but only if the story is good enough. When you reward viewers with silence, tension and depth you get focus, emotion and engagement … and this is where real change lives.

So let’s stop designing for the scroll. Stop making stories shorter, simpler, shinier. Make them worth pausing for.

That’s the creative challenge of our time: To earn attention, not hijack it. To hold someone still; not with shock, but with significance, because success should not be measured by impressions, those fleeting flickers of pixels mistaken for impact.

For brands, this is the difference between content that fills a feed and work that shapes culture.

For writers and storytellers, it’s a matter of respect; for the audience and for the craft.

Fin.