I really thought I\u2019d 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\u2019d find a way to start again. All I needed was subtitles. I bought\u00a0Good Bye, Lenin!\u00a0and got ready to watch Daniel Br\u00fchl lovingly trick his mother into thinking the Berlin Wall hadn\u2019t fallen. I was excited.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t work. Within half an hour, I\u2019d paused the movie to look at my phone. My whole scheme had failed: the bet I\u2019d 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\u2019t go anywhere. In the end, I watched\u00a0Good Bye, Lenin!\u00a0bit by bit, unable to care about the story for more than around 20 minutes at a time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was infuriating, but I wasn\u2019t that surprised \u2013 merely disappointed. Something shifted in me earlier this year, and I just can\u2019t meaningfully consume media on a computer or a phone anymore. I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
To be clear, that doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019ve 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\u2019s the latter.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re halfway through the year and, already, I\u2019ve been to the cinema 11 times. I\u2019ve been to see recent releases \u2013\u00a0A Real Pain,\u00a0Thunderbolts\u00a0\u2013 and older movies being shown again by places like the Prince Charles, in central London. I\u2019d missed\u00a0Interstellar\u00a0when it came out back in 2014 but finally saw it a few months ago. It really is as good as people said it was.<\/p>\n
In that time, I\u2019ve also finished 24 books, and started but abandoned seven or eight more. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t quite have the same discipline when it comes to the press, but I\u2019ve had my moments. A few weeks ago, I bought the\u00a0Economist\u00a0at 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The only problem, really, is that most of my livelihood depends on as few people as possible doing what I did. I\u2019ve 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\u00a0Evening Standard, the majority of my work has been published online.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t the only one which has been left for dead by social media, what is the rest of my career going to look like?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
How\u2019s that for a paradox? Do as I say, not as I do! No, really, please do \u2013 at least until I\u2019ve figured something else out. Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I really thought I\u2019d nailed it the other night. I used to watch a movie on my laptop…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":50135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[12043,712,398,158,37903,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-50134","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-arts-and-culture","9":"tag-internet","10":"tag-media","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-technology-and-business","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114820637315290814","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}