I Make Boring Videos
Before diving into this video, I have a question: do I have your undivided attention? If you're working or playing a game, I highly suggest you pause everything for the next 10 to 15 minutes and only listen to my words. You don't have to, of course, but I think your unwavering focus would be good for this topic, and you'll see why in a minute or two.
I asked if you were doing something else because I know people love to watch these in the background of their lives, while doing the dishes or driving to work, or about to go to sleep. I get it. The intentional, slow-paced nature of these videos makes them great for those kinds of situations. Admittedly, these videos are slow-paced; no one would confuse them for trying to overwhelm your senses or manipulate you into paying attention. I take pauses in my narration and rarely throw text on the screen. The ambient music supporting my voice is slow-paced, and that's also true for the visuals. I make the videos this way on purpose because I think slow can be a good thing.
Some might call the pace boring; I think it's relaxed. My videos require patience, but I'd say that’s a virtue in a world where attention spans are shrinking rapidly. A lot of YouTube creators use a technique called hyper-retention editing. This is where they cut a video together to be as stimulating as possible. The videos feature nauseatingly quick cuts and rapid-fire text, and they're always trying to hook you with forced uncertainties, making you wonder what will happen next or how something will play out.
Most media works this way, but this is storytelling on steroids. After a small sample audience has viewed their video, creators will use YouTube's analytics and editing features to cut out parts with low viewer retention. This gives the video an even more relentless feel. YouTube creators cut their videos like an infomercial designed to hold your attention as long as possible. The longer they keep you watching, the more likely you'll make a purchase or something. YouTube, as a whole, works in a similar way; the longer you stay on the platform, the more ads you see and the more ad revenue the platform generates.
As a result, a content creator who can keep people glued to their screens longer creates more value for YouTube. The algorithm rewards these high-retention channels by feeding their videos to more potential viewers, and the cycle continues. However, the consequence of the structure is that the best-performing videos are the ones that are over-stimulating. They appeal to people with lower attention spans, and those are becoming more and more common. But this is nothing compared to short-form video.
Speaking of making videos, I want to take a moment to thank the sponsor of today's video: Paperlike, a product that has helped me tremendously in the video-making process for this channel. When making these videos, I usually use my iPad to jot down some ideas, take notes, annotate research papers, sketch out thumbnails, and shot ideas. If you've ever written on a glossy screen, you know how unnatural it feels. This is why I love Paperlike; it gives me that tactile feel of real paper with all the benefits of taking digital notes and drawings.
I've been using the original Paperlike for years, but they just made a huge improvement to the product that fixed the one minor gripe I had with the previous version: visibility. Paperlike 2.1 offers much better visual clarity than the last gen, thanks to its nano dots layer that is now spread more evenly across the surface of the screen protector to minimize refractions and keep the screen looking sharp. It does all this while still giving you the same papery feel and texture that I've always liked about this product. If you draw or write on your iPad, I really can't recommend Paperlike enough. Head to paperlike.com/aperture or simply click the link at the top of the description to get yours today.
TikTok was designed from the ground up for our crumbling attention span, with 15 to 30-second videos displayed in an endless stream. TikTok users say they struggle to watch longer-form videos; they find watching longer videos feels stressful compared to the short clips. Anyone struggling to watch a movie without checking their phone multiple times is probably keenly aware of this feeling. It's gotten so bad that even these short videos are no longer appealing enough on their own. Now, to keep people watching a 30-second TikTok, you need a clip from GTA at the bottom with the car flipping down the hill, a random DIY at the top, a trending sound, and a captivating story from Reddit that ends just before the payoff.
This might seem like a strange mess to an onlooker, but if you're on TikTok a lot, this is basically every other video on your For You page. This endless feed of over-stimulating content on social media has dramatically cut our attention spans; we've gone from 2 and 1/2 minutes of focus on average in 2004 down to just 75 seconds in 2012, and now a miserable 47 seconds. And it's not just social media; it's just phones in general. When you receive a notification, you're hardwired to respond to it. It's gotten so bad that we've developed phantom vibration syndrome—a tactile form of hallucination where you feel like your phone is vibrating when it's not.
Somehow, our mind doesn't think of a distraction like Instagram as wasting time. It's not like we're stopping to watch a movie or play a video game, yet we'll often lose a similar amount of time, if not more. Every time we switch our focus onto something else, our minds need to reset. We don't enter the ideal flow state for our work and projects, and we waste endless time in transition. But it's not entirely our fault. You see, many of us crave these cheap dopamine hits because we're unhappy: jobs are stressful, and we're struggling with loneliness, and we don't make enough money, and it goes on.
To escape this perpetual stress, we focus on something that gives us a dopamine rush, albeit a temporary one. The fact that it's not our fault, though, doesn't mean we can't do anything to fix it. So, how do you continue to gain knowledge and learn skills in a world of ever-decreasing attention spans, especially when kids are growing up using social media before they leave middle school? When we're constantly distracted from our learning, we don't absorb as much information; we struggle with complex concepts and skim through books instead of reading for depth. We become used to taking things in bite-size doses, and we don't have the patience to develop critical thinking.
In response to this problem, many tech companies and institutions are turning to gamification to make learning easier for the collective short attention span. Gamification has already spread across society, from education to self-improvement apps. It's everywhere. Language learning apps are gamified, exercises are gamified, tablets are introduced in classrooms with gamified lessons. Even brushing your teeth with an electric toothbrush comes with a fun app that rewards the brusher. As an approach to learning, gamification does help some kids focus better and retain more information, but it also has some adverse effects.
It encourages competitiveness over cooperation, and those who don't enjoy gamification tend to give up quickly and check out. Gamification feels like an endless feedback loop: more time on our smartphones makes learning harder, so we gamify learning on smartphones. This makes traditional learning hard and encourages more gamification. A big problem with the spread of gamified everything is that life isn't like a game; it doesn't have satisfying objectives with defined solutions. Reality is often murkier and requires thinking outside the boundaries. Even if gamification helps with learning, do we risk training ourselves to expect gamification everywhere? Will we lose patience for non-gamified forms of education, self-improvement, and just navigating life in general?
Daily life requires cooperation and being social; gamification doesn't help in these areas and seems to encourage the opposite. It pushes individual success and makes dealing with others seem more like a chore. We'd rather be on our dopamine-inducing apps. Relationships aren't filled with instant gratification; they require patience and effort to maintain. You don't get a badge for helping out a friend or some jewels when you cheer up your partner. It's probably why dating apps don't help more people find love. Modern dating apps like Tinder are a game where you try to score dates. Although technically they can be used to find romance, they spawn a brutal dating culture where people are treated like objects for consumption. Games are about winning, not about forming deep connections.
I'm not suggesting that gamification doesn't have its benefits; it can be helpful when we're struggling with goals and need more motivation than we can muster on our own. But widespread use is bound to come with personal and social problems. So where is all of this headed? Is it possible that our concern about attention spans is overblown? And what if it's not? Could our waning attention become an epidemic like obesity? And what does that world look like? Are we headed to a place where no one has the patience for anything or anyone? It sounds like a lonely nightmare; it already feels like a lonely nightmare.
We can resist this epidemic, though. We can replace some of these social media habits with healthier ones. Instead of scrolling TikTok, you could watch longer-form educational content. You can make time for reading; reading for just 20 consecutive minutes helps to improve your attention span. We can reject gamification and accept the discomfort of learning without a score or a badge. We can do nothing and embrace the anxiety from feeling like we always need to be doing something because eventually that feeling will pass.
Getting your attention span back is about improving your well-being and your relationships with others. Does it feel good to sit next to someone you love and scroll on your phone instead of talking to each other? How does it feel when you're excited about a new relationship and they'd rather check Instagram than connect on a deeper level? The tech of social media and gamification has been put upon us, and it's not our fault that we've been lured into the rapid decline of our attention. Kids especially don't have a choice regarding what tech they're introduced to, and sadly, we probably don't have a way to stop the world's collective attention from shrinking.
But you can take your own focus back and influence those around you. While writing this video, I discovered in my research that your mind needs to reset after every distraction. I mentioned this earlier and, based on this finding, I decided to be strict about letting myself wander mid-writing. I wanted to be in that flow state to improve the script and make sure I had the time to say everything I wanted to say, and it helped a lot. I got to stay in the script longer, which improved everything about the process.
After a while, I’d let myself take a break, but I made the breaks very intentional. We already resist our declining attention spans in a variety of ways. Many parents limit screen time for their kids, focusing on a more grounded upbringing. They encourage reading, crafts, and physical play over tablet use. People are always quitting social media and often reducing their use of it. Our smartphones even let us know how much time we spend staring at them and all the hours we waste looking at vacation photos on Instagram.
That's not to suggest that Apple or Google have altruistic motives in making you self-aware of your phone use; it's probably just about improving their image. You can resist, and there are people and even organizations around you who are looking to do the same. Anyway, that's ultimately why I make the videos slow. I don't want to contribute to an epidemic of misery; I want to encourage the opposite of that world. And without resorting to high retention editing and in-your-face text, my videos do pretty well anyway.
People like you have the patience to watch these all the way through, telling YouTube that they're worth sharing with a bigger audience. Many of you are subscribers who return to the channel when that blue or red dot appears beside the name Aperture. This habit of yours makes the channel less dependent on gaming the algorithm. So ultimately, I need to thank you for paying attention to these boring videos, and I promise to keep them dull for the foreseeable future. Like this video, where I talk about how overstimulation might be ruining your life.