Attention Recession

There is a number floating around that many people cite at conferences without really interrogating it. You have probably heard some version of it: the average human attention span is now shorter than a goldfish's. Eight seconds. The goldfish, apparently, gets nine. The story was everywhere for a decade. Microsoft published it with their full chest, and marketers tattooed it onto their strategy decks (we know all about that). It was never true.

The goldfish statistic was traced back to a 2015 report that misread its own sourced data. Neuroscientists never endorsed it. The human attention system does not degrade like a battery losing charge. What has actually happened is far more interesting and instructive for anyone working in a creative field.

We have become ruthless editors.

Our brains have not shortened their capacity for focus, but have gotten better at rejecting inputs that do not immediately signal value. The average person now encounters somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 brand messages per day. The response has not been cognitive collapse, but triaged. And the creative industry, by and large, has responded to this triage problem by producing more, louder, faster content. More posts, campaigns, touchpoints, and channels.

This is roughly equivalent to responding to a traffic jam by adding more cars (what a genius)

We are not living through an attention crisis. We are living through a meaning crisis.

The Problem With Feeding the Machine

According to research from the Nielsen Norman Group, one of the most respected UX research organizations in the world, users read approximately 20-28% of the text on a given webpage. The rest is scanned, skipped, or ignored entirely. Attention is not absent, but now conditional. It shows up when something earns it.

And yet the dominant creative strategy of the last decade has been frequency over meaning. The logic goes: if people are distracted, reach them more often. Post every day. Email every week. Run always-on paid media. Fill the feed. The algorithm rewards consistency, so consistency becomes the strategy.

The problem is that this thinking treats attention like a resource that can be captured through volume. It cannot. Attention is a response to meaning. It is what happens in the brain when something registers as worth the cognitive energy. You can manufacture reach, but you cannot manufacture resonance.

Look at what has actually broken through in the last few years. Bottega Veneta, the Italian luxury house, deleted its social media accounts entirely in January 2021. No Instagram. No Twitter. No TikTok** (they seem to only have YouTube). The fashion industry predicted irrelevance. What happened instead was a 24 percent revenue increase that year, followed by consistent record-breaking quarters. The silence became the statement. The absence became the brand.

Nendo, the Tokyo-based design studio led by Oki Sato, releases work infrequently and has almost no social media presence given its cultural footprint. When Nendo says something, it lands. Not because their work is louder than everyone else's, but because it feels quieter. The studio has built a reputation that makes each release feel like an event rather than content.

These are not flukes, but early signals of a larger shift for now

Economics of Scarcity in a World of Abundance

Scott Galloway, the NYU professor and writer, has a useful framing for moments like this. When a commodity becomes abundant, the adjacent scarce resource becomes exponentially more valuable. When streaming made music infinitely available, the live concert experience became more valuable, not less. When digital photography made images effectively free to produce, the handmade print became more coveted. When social media made communication constant, the handwritten letter became remarkable.

What is scarce right now is restraint. The willingness to say less, mean more, and trust your audience to close the distance.

For creative leaders, this has direct implications. The portfolio, crammed with 40 pieces, communicates insecurity. The portfolio with 10 extraordinary pieces communicates confidence. The brand that communicates daily about everything it does blurs into background noise. The brand that communicates occasionally but with precision earns attention every single time.

Harvard Business Review research on persuasion and cognition consistently shows that people assign higher credibility and authority to sources that communicate selectively. The brain interprets restraint as confidence. Silence, used intentionally, signals that whoever is speaking has the self-assurance to wait until they have something worth saying.

This is not a new idea. It is one of the oldest ideas in communication. What is new is how badly the creative industry has abandoned it, and how wide open the opportunity now is for those willing to pick it back up.

Three Things Worth Trying This Week

1. First, audit your last ten pieces of output, whether that is social posts, decks, emails, or projects, and ask honestly: which of these would you choose to include if you could only share three? Now ask why you shared the others.
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2. Second, the next time you feel the urge to add to a piece of work, try removing something instead. One sentence, element, or slide. See if it gets stronger or weaker. Then notice what the result tells you about your instincts.
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3. Third, identify one area of your creative practice where you are communicating out of anxiety rather than readiness. It might be posting too frequently because you fear being forgotten. It might be taking on too many projects because you are not sure which ones represent your actual point of view. Name it. That recognition is the beginning of the shift.

The Attention Recession is not a crisis for creatives who make things that matter and have the discipline to wait until they do. It is a filter. And filters, ultimately, are gifts to the people who have something real to say.

The question is not whether you are producing enough. The question is whether what you are producing is worth the attention you are asking for.

Most of the time, the answer is yes, if you would just give it the time and space it deserves.

Peace.