While idly trying to find something of interest to read one evening I found myself at medium, looking for tech news articles. I didn’t end up reading anything, because I was suddenly struck by how awful it was that every article has a tag line underneath it telling us how many minutes it takes to read it. The examples I saw were ‘3 minute read’ ‘5 minute read’ ‘6 minute read’.
This is staggeringly depressing.
Imagine the situation where you want to read something, which means taking new information into your brain, and you are only able to commit to a 3 minute session of reading, not 5 minutes. Unless you are the US president, or Elon Musk, you probably don’t actually have to save the vital 2 minutes difference. So this metric is not really being given to be in any way helpful, its being given as a kind of reassurance, or in the 6 minute case, presumably as some sort of urgent trigger warning. Its no great revelation that social media is warping out minds, but I really don’t think we appreciate just how bad its getting. When you cannot make a safe assumption that someone’s attention will be held for even 6 minutes, we are in real serious trouble.
The world is scarily complex. Way more so than when I was a schoolkid. The sheer tonnage of stuff you should know about now, that wasn’t even a thing back then is scary. Primarily, its the way tech works, so you have to know how computers work (roughly), what apps are, what wireless internet is, how to charge a phone/laptop, how to use a trackpad or touchscreen, how to swap between apps, how to type (actually not considered important when I was 5 years old), some idea of what email and spam are, how to pick a password, what a username is, what a browser is. How to swipe between items on a phone, what an update is…
…and its not like the real world is simpler either. My parents were very unusual because they had traveled to Europe! but never beyond. Their parents had only left the country to invade/liberate others. As a result, knowing a lot more about an incredibly connected world is now much more important. I only knew the concept of ‘forename/surname’ reversal from the bajorans in star trek:deep space nine. I had no idea that was a thing. I only really understood the complexity of honorifics last year. As a child, the most exotic food I encountered was spaghetti.
In 2024, its just assumed that anyone in the UK is familiar with the culture and cuisine of pretty much the entire planet. Most stuff we buy comes from outside the UK (this was NOT true in the 1970s), most people travel outside their home country. This is awesome, and beneficial, and culturally enriching, but it makes like so much more COMPLEX.
Plus science and technology marches on, and culture becomes more complex. Watch a TV drama from the 1970s or 1980s. Something you may notice is the plots are relatively simple, the narrative is linear. The same is true of most literature. The ‘fractured narrative’ is a relatively recent trend. When ‘Lost’ debuted on TV, it was radically different, complex, inter-twined stories which required serious attention. Modern TV drama relish their super-complex plotlines, flashbacks, deception and feints. This was not always the case. At the same time, every academic field has got more complex. I studied Economics before Behavioral economics was even invented. It didn’t ‘replace’ what I learned, it augmented and expanded it. This diagram is apparently series 1 of ‘dark?
Life’s complex as fuck these days
But meanwhile we seem to be systematically destroying our capability to do what it is sometimes referred to as Deep Work. What is Deep Work?
“Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
In other words, pretty much anything thats really worthwhile is Deep Work. And to do deep work, you need the exact opposite of the social-media fueled doom-scroll focus-destroying mindset that every big tech company seems to be pushing us towards. Perhaps the worst examples are TikTok and Instagram. They seem hyper-focused on super-short, non-interactive consumption of tiny tiny nuggets of dopamine. By comparison even X is better, as it now supports long-form posts and at least seems to be more focused on interaction, and thus conversation/interrogation.
I find myself deeply worried about my own ability to concentrate on long form text, or to be engrossed in any long form activity. I can go play the guitar for 30 minutes, but after that I start to wonder if I have any email. As an 18yo kid, I would happily go 8 hours playing scales to a metronome. No distraction required or desired. I didn’t stop until desperately hungry.
Quite a few years ago, on a whim, I started to read Winston Churchill’s war diaries. All of them. Its a lot. When you are the leader of a major military state in world war 2, you have a LOT to write. And Churchill wasn’t famous for brevity. The volumes now sit proudly in a bookcase, a rare example of an entire set of tiny-text serious books that I made it through. Reading them was a bit of a slog, but I’m glad I did, especially considering how much time I now seem to just wase entirely checking twitter or scrolling through slashdot stories I will never read.
I do genuinely worry that we are already splitting into a society of basically 2 different groups. A tiny, tiny group of people who are working out how everything works, and doing serious research and work on making things better, and then a vastly larger group of us who just doom-scroll, or spend our days sending memes and emojis, and pretending to do work. Increasingly the idea of spending serious time to learn very complex new skills sounds ‘lame’ compared to trying to be witty on twitter in the desperate hope of ‘going viral’.
At this point you are wondering if there is any way I can steer this blog post back to either video games or solar panels, and believe it or not, I can, and much faster the Winston Churchill would have done, let me assure you. I’m going to talk about a specific videogame : Dwarf Fortress.
I’ve only tried to play Dwarf Fortress once. It was about 5 years ago. I didn’t get into it at all. Its not for me. I LOVE the idea of it, and love that it exists, but its really not for me. But thats not important. All you need to know about Dwarf Fortress is that it is ludicrously, hilariously, insanely detailed. Its a city builder for dwarfs, where the UI (originally) was just a bunch of text. It doesn’t matter, all you need to know is it was basically a hobby project, where the creators lived off donations from obsessive players. There are way more details here.
This is where I give you a dopamine hit by skipping narratives to talk about the plight of the average indie game developer trying to get press attention. I know a lot of people who try this, and their strategies are very different, but in many cases there is a reliance on social media, and a desire to use the correct hashtags, and construct posts just right so you can strike it lucky and go mega viral. This Never Works. And BTW, even when it does work, it doesn’t work. I once made a stupidly viral tweet with about 80,000 likes. Do you think I was able to steer that into more sales of my games? (spoiler: no).
Dwarf Fortress was the absolute opposite, its two creators basically just stuck their heads down, and kept working and improving and developing and updating the game for years and years and years. It was first released in 2006, so that’s 18 years so far, or much longer than World War II. To work on a single game for so long is impressive. It requires amazing attention to detail, incredible passion, and people who are perfectly happy to say to people literally decades later ‘yes I am still working on that thing’. And the very very best bit of the story? When they finally put their game up for sale for actual money on steam, they made bazillions of dollars overnight. It was a decades-long overnight success.
The thing is, if you say to people now “you need to work really hard, all the time, probably for decades, and you will then probably have the same result”, absolutely nobody will even consider this as an option. These days the idea of coding your own game engine is considered some freakish, weird, obsessive things that only super-autistics gluttons for punishment like me or jon blow would consider. It used to be the norm. At one point, everyone had to do it, and nobody died as a result.
I am currently coding a new game. The game may never be released. At the moment its still a secret, and mostly a hobby. Its VERY similar to another game I made, but because I dislike getting old code to recompile, and because frankly I LOVE to code, I’m basically recreating that old game, and its engine, entirely from scratch, instead of reusing the old code. This means thousands of small improvements, that I’d never make if I just ‘updated’ the old code. I enjoy doing it, and regret nothing. I am also quite glad I can still do it.
We desperately need to retain the ability to focus long and hard on complex stuff. Its an essential skill, and I suspect almost everyone reading this is struggling with it, in the face of social media, and tech companies desire to kill our attention spans. I urge you to fight back. Pick a seriously long book and read the whole thing. Or pick a new technology or skill and commit to serious long stretches to master it. It is incredibly fulfilling. I have spent a mad number of hours learning to play the guitar. At this point in my life it serves no real ‘purpose’ career-wise, but I still get a lot of joy from knowing I have that skill and can still do it.
Well done, you read the whole thing :D