How many videos do you watch in a day? How many hours of movies, shows, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram reels? How many ads? The answer may surprise you!

Recently, I decided to conduct an experiment and stop watching all videos for a day. And boy, was that a long day! I didn’t know how to survive without watching anything. What do you do if you’re not watching something while eating? Where do you point your eyes? At the food? Like a barbarian!

At first I got bored out of my mind. Time refused to move. My eyes thirsted for excitement. Reality was too boring.

Then, I decided to read a book. A book I’ve been making my way through for months now but it’s hard to concentrate for more than a few pages in a day. But without videos to hook my attention, I found the book much easier to get into. But there’s only so much readnig you can do and I was bored again.

I missed the shows I had been binging but somehow I managed to not break my resolution to not watch any video.

The day ended with me going to bed early and waking up in the middle of the night with the realization that video not just killed the radio star, it’s killing all of us!

Attention Mining

There is a new gold rush going on. Instead of gold, we’re mining attention. Many adventurous prospectors have already become millionaires by capturing the attention of billions of people.

But why is attention worth anything?

Because advertisers are willing to pay for it. And businessmen never do anything unprofitable for too long. Which means that in the end, it’s we who are paying for capturing our own attention, through the money we spend on stuff that was advertised to us.

Our attention is captured and we are lured into buying more stuff. Some of that money goes into the manufacturing and transportation of that product. Some of it goes into the pockets of the owners and shareholders. And the rest of it goes back into advertisements.

When it comes to capturing attention there’s nothing quite like video. At least not yet. Why do you think these billionaires keep trying to get us to wear dorky headsets and immerse ourselves in virtual reality? Because that will capture our attention even more inescapably than video.

But why is video so engaging?

Blame Evolution

We are visual creatures. Humans have great eyesight. We are trained by biology to pay attention whenever something is moving in front of our eyes. Even babies get hooked on to video, even though they can’t understand anything that’s happening. All they know is that something is happening. Unlike reading or listening to audio, video can be consumed passively. So, it requires almost no effort to focus our attention on it.

Now in itself, there’s nothing wrong in wanting to watch a story unfold on a screen. The problem is the overwhelming quantity of video vying for our attention. It’s like free cocaine, constantly being given away by big media companies, and small individual content creators, and our own friends and family. It’s not illegal. There’ll be no jail time. It’s super enticing. All day long. Every damn day. And we are all hooked. This is bad news because we are not good at self-regulation.

A Little History

When I was growing up, there was only one source of visual content and that was the television. And there was only one channel on TV; the state run Doordarshan. Then in 1992 India opened up its economy and we got cable TV. Watching television became a daily routine. There were already enough shows and movies to fill up the visual content watching time in the evening. And the number of channels just kept increasing.

Then I went to college and got access to the internet. Suddenly, a world of movies and shows opened up. We downloaded pirated movies and shows non-stop and started going through all the “must watch” movies and shows of Hollywood.

Then came social media and YouTube and Netflix and everything else. Now there’s so much content that no one can stay on top of all of it. You can’t watch all the popular Netflix series and then watch the new shows on Apple TV and then stay on top of Amazon Prime Video while also watching all your favorite YouTube channels.

It’s Death by a Million Videos

The level of stimulation required to be engaged has increased. When there’s nothing to watch, it feels incredibly boring. It didn’t used to feel this way when we weren’t used to always having something to watch on our tiny tv in our pocket.

This will lead to a brave new world of unproductive consumers who are easily bored if they don’t have anything to watch. Of course, there’ll always be something to watch. Soon AI will start creating content at a faster rate than humans ever could. And it will be surreal and absurd. And we’ll be hooked none the less.

Humans will lose the ability to focus without any visual stimulus and so no one will read anymore. We might watch movies based on books, but we’ll no longer have the capacity to sit down and read a book on our own. That, along with clickbait titles and polarized content, will lead to stupider and stupider constituents, who’ll vote for stupider and stupider politicians.

Then one day, someone will launch all the nukes and humanity will die. But don’t worry, we’ll get to watch this ultimate pyrotechnic show on livestream. Before it’s night night forever.

Well, maybe not, maybe we’ll evolve a way to deal with this endless stream of content, but I must end this post here to justify the clickbait title.