The collapse of modern attention (and how to get it back) - Cal Newport - #1067
Modern Wisdom
Chris Williamson
4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2026
⏱️ 106 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Dude, you must be feeling like Cassandra at the moment. |
| 0:04.8 | So prescient, the distraction, the necessity of deep work, the inherent bombardment of our attention. |
| 0:11.6 | Do you feel like you saw the future earlier than what even at the time maybe felt late with deep work and focusing on quality over quantity and stuff? |
| 0:20.3 | I mean, I think part of what I noticed was the present was crazy to me, and no one else recognized it. |
| 0:25.2 | So it was less even predicting the future. |
| 0:27.2 | I feel like there was a time, God, it's like 10 years ago now, where I was looking around and, yeah, saying two things. |
| 0:34.0 | One, social media doesn't make sense. |
| 0:36.7 | Why are we all pretending like this is at the center of democracy and civic life and all business? We all have to be on here all the time. And two, email doesn't make sense. Not what was going to happen in the future. I'm just like looking at the way we're working today with email and Slack and Teams was coming. Like, this completely does not make sense. You're switching your context once every two or three minutes. This is a terrible way to actually use your brain. So I never thought of myself as predicting the future as much as just telling people what was going on then. Then it makes sense. And everyone thought I was crazy. And 10 years later, it just kind of jumped from I was crazy to its common sense. So it's not even that interesting that I'm saying it anymore. |
| 1:11.2 | So I kind of skipped the part where it sounded prescient. |
| 1:15.0 | Do you feel vindicated? |
| 1:17.6 | I think certainly on a couple issues. |
| 1:20.3 | The social media issue was a big one because I used to get a lot of flack for that. |
| 1:25.1 | For going out, and I wasn't even saying the social media was bad or that |
| 1:30.0 | no one should use it really what i was pushing back on was just the idea of ubiquity the idea that |
| 1:35.7 | everyone had to use it i said this doesn't make sense i get there some people this makes sense for |
| 1:39.6 | there's a lot of technologies that have markets that make sense for it but why is there this pressure |
| 1:43.7 | for everyone to be on these services this is not not going to a good place. They're spending a lot of money |
| 1:49.2 | to mine attention and they're going to get better at it, right? And at the time, this was considered |
| 1:53.7 | crazy. What do you mean? Like, you wouldn't use social media. I wrote a New York Times op-ed back. |
| 1:59.8 | I looked this up the other day. It was |
| 2:01.1 | 2016. And it argued maybe social media is not the biggest thing for a young person to focus on if they're |
| 2:09.3 | thinking about their career. That's what it was. It was like focus on your career instead of social |
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