Is Your Attention Span Less Than a Goldfish’s?
From social media platforms like TikTok to mainstream TV shows like CoComelon, our attention spans, as a society, are decreasing by the day. As everything is easily accessible and at our fingertips, we fall into a destructive pattern of cycling through dozens, if not hundreds, of short-form videos to entertain our minds. The more we “scroll,” however, the less we can focus on the topics that really matter.
Regarding the popular children’s show, CoCoMelon, Isaiah Saldivar addresses its more sinister side: “They say right now ADHD is at a record-breaking high for kids, that it’s all no attention span; kids can’t sit through anything, sit through class, sit through a movie because their attention spans are being ruined from shows like CoComelon and from TikTok and from Instagram.” Using certain color patterns and saturations, CoComelon seeks to make children addicted to the show. Studies have also shown that children who are disrupted while watching the show “became energized with rage, threw tantrums, and developing speech delays.”
Dr. Colbert’s Spiritual Health Zone unravels the dangers of living this fast-paced lifestyle: “We live in what is best described as a fast-paced, ADD/ADHD society, with roughly 11 percent of US children having been diagnosed with ADHD at some point, according to a 2022 survey. Everyone seems to possess shortened attention spans compared to people in previous generations. I’m convinced that almost all of us are affected by this trend to some degree. Is it even possible anymore to distinguish between people who genuinely have ADHD and those who do not? Not if you examine most people’s habits. People lose focus in church. They lack the mental stamina to go deeply into a topic. Even social media and internet videos are becoming ‘shorts’ and ‘reels,’ brief enough to deliver something of seeming value quickly so people can move on to the next. The only way some people can ‘abide’ is by sitting on the couch or in bed for hours scrolling through five hundred posts. Our capacity for soaking in the river of life is ebbing away as our culture speeds up and people become less able to direct their attention to one topic for any length of time.
I remember regularly having three-hour church services with Benny Hinn when he pastored in Orlando, and nobody thought anything of it. I remember tarrying at many altars, waiting on the Lord. As people remained and gave God room to move, amazing things happened. Demons came out of people, believers were baptized in the Holy Spirit, true repentance and reconciliations were achieved, and bodies were healed. How many times do people today rush past their miracle, their deliverance, their healing because they don’t have the patience and self-control to stay for a while in God’s presence?
Daniel 12:4 records that the angel Gabriel prophesied this reality twenty-five hundred years ago when he said, ‘Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.’ These astonishingly prescient words depict a time of unprecedented knowledge, such as what we live in today in this Information Age. Futurist R. Buckminster Fuller first identified the ‘knowledge doubling curve’ in his 1981 book, Critical Path, in which he stated that human knowledge had doubled approximately every century until around 1900, but by the end of World War II, it was doubling every twenty-five years. ‘Years later, IBM researchers published a report that…predicted that “by 2020, knowledge would double every 12 hours, fueled by the Internet of Things.”’
But this explosion of knowledge is coupled with a restlessness that keeps us chasing satisfaction all across the globe while never finding it. This must be why many preachers don’t instruct their people to abide in God’s love but rather teach to the shortened attention spans of our culture. The most they hope to accomplish is to help their hearers get along in the broken-down lives they lead—equipping them for ongoing failure and shallowness on their way to heaven. Meat never gets served, only milkshakes and gospel lattes. I’ve seen people who have attended church regularly for fifty years who are still eating spiritual ‘baby food’! They should be fathers and mothers in the Lord, but they remain infants because they have not abided in love. They live mostly on the banks of the River of life.
Sadly, I’ve come to realize that many believers don’t even know this river of heavenly love is available to them as a lived reality. They are conscious of a lot of things—their careers, entertainment, health problems, relationships, retirement plans—but not of the ever-available love of God. Some Christians take a sip of that love now and then, but too few of us plunge in headfirst and gulp it in. We desperately need a revelation and ongoing awareness of the power of the love of God if we are to break free of There is no way to live effectively on the banks of the river. We must step into the flow of God’s love daily.”
For more information on Don Colbert, MD’s newest book, Dr. Colbert’s Spiritual Health Zone, visit Mycharismashop.com