Attention Span

After tuning into Apple’s latest keynote, I considered writing about their design process — and the magic it still manages to pull off.

But the more I considered the idea, the more it felt off — applauding precision and speed while something more sacred slips away. Attention. Connection. Time — traded for dopamine and dings.

So instead, this letter will be a small rebellion.

A defense of the slow, the sacred, the full-bodied experience.

Once upon a time I discovered the library at Park Elementary School in Mill Valley. The first time I got lost in a book, the world around me disappeared. I wasn’t just reading; I was living inside the lines. The story rearranged me. My thoughts slowed and stretched. I felt larger on the inside after I finished.

That kind of reading feels rare now.

We graze, but we don’t grasp. Tasting everything, digesting nothing.

No wonder the deep read is endangered.

I recently read an essay about this slow erosion. It begins with an honors student sobbing in her professor’s office, confessing: “I can’t read.”

Not because she didn’t want to. Because she simply couldn’t follow the thread of a novel.

Her mind wandered. Her eyes skimmed.

The novel became noise.

No, this isn’t a story about lazy kids or slipping expectations — it’s about a seismic shift in how we process the world. A crisis not of effort, but of capacity. Of precious attention.

Another student — an English major — graduated without ever reading a full book.

He got by on summaries, YouTube explainers, adaptations.

He could fake comprehension well enough to earn a degree, but the thing itself — the encounter with the unabridged, unskimmed whole — never happened.

Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows, describes this as more than a habit shift. It’s neurological:

“The linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts.”

The internet didn’t just change how we read — it changed what reading means.

The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

And when we lose that, we don’t just lose a skill.

We lose access to the parts of ourselves that can imagine, empathize, sit with ambiguity, metabolize complexity, and remain present with what can't be simplified.

We lose a way of being.

I witness smart, curious, imaginative children — caught in dopamine loops, engineered by trillion-dollar companies that harvest their attention in real time. And in a world that rewards speed and fragments, what chance does coherence have?

In branding briefs, there's a thirst for instant clarity and a fear of saying something too layered, too long, too… human.

Clients want to say everything at once. No pauses.

Voices get sanded down until they’re frictionless, forgettable, AI-adjacent.

But clarity without depth isn’t clarity. It’s a facade

And facades don’t hold.

Cal Newport, in Deep Work, writes:

“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”

To read deeply, to work with focus — these aren’t indulgences.

They’re oxygen.

Design, like literature, needs room —

to breathe, to wander, to land.

To leave some things unsaid.

To trust subtext.

To wait.

When we design, write, or make anything at all —

we shape more than what’s seen.

We shape how people read the world. ✦

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