"When everyone is chasing attention, there is none." - Futurist Jim Carroll
We have officially entered the "Attention Recession."
Spend any time online these days, and it seems like everyone is screaming and no one is listening. There's a lot of noise and not a lot of signal. People shouting into a silence.
The problems are many, but first and foremost, it's clear that the oversupply of supercharged AI content is running up against the biological capacity of human attention. I suspect we have hit what we might call "peak social media," a tipping point where businesses can no longer rely on the quantity of time spent, but must fight for the quality of focus.
The fact is, statistics show no one pays attention to anything anymore! You've already lost interest in this post. One study says Generation Z now averages just 6.5 seconds of attention per post, while pre-teens have dropped to a mere 4.2 seconds. This saturation has triggered a "desperation economy" on professional networks - LinkedIn in particular - where people think social media is a tool that might help them to draw some attention, where there is, in fact, none.
What does work? "Rage bait." If you want to get noticed, you need to be a dick. In 2026, it's evolved from a trolling tactic into a primary growth strategy because algorithms are designed to reward the intensity of anger over the nuance of education.
People are abandoning their attention on social media at the same time that they are finding it harder to use it more.
2026.
Weird.
Futurist Jim Carroll appreciates the 4.2 seconds you might have spent skimming this post.