Everyone is always talking about how our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and they’re right! I know so many people who can’t sit through a movie that lasts 90 minutes without checking their phones. I can barely read for an hour without taking a quick break to see what I missed on Twitter. It’s so funny that in the past, novels and films were seen as frivolous distractions from getting important work done. Now, it’s a mark of sophistication if you watch movies in the movie theatre instead of being on TikTok for 13 hours daily. Imagine how much we could get done if we only had the technological access available to an 18th-century wealthy scholar.

No matter what time period you are living in, there will always be those of us who struggle to focus on everything, including leisure activities like scrolling through hilarious lists of memes.