Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. He has created a musical piece titled “Spans” for you to enjoy while reading this column.
We live in a time when attention spans are shrinking. Movies are cut shorter, television shows change perspectives every few seconds, music is rarely longer than five minutes, and journalism tends to prefer punchy, short-form articles to long essays. Online platforms reinforce this habit by rewarding brevity and penalizing depth. Everything is condensed into a quick hit, a spark meant to capture attention for an instant before the audience moves on.
And yet, the great achievements of human history have never been the result of short attention spans. Complex problems require sustained focus over years, decades, and sometimes centuries. The meandering path of creativity may not be efficient, but it is the only way new things of substance come into being.
Consider the pyramids. These monumental works took decades to build. Thousands of people invested their entire lives in a project that many of them never lived to see completed. There was no shortcut, no way to compress the process into a single season or an election cycle. The pyramids stand today precisely because they were the result of long attention spans, of collective patience stretched across generations.
Fast forward to the modern era. Suspension bridges, some of the most iconic pieces of infrastructure in the world, required years of planning, engineering, and construction. The Brooklyn Bridge, for example, took over a decade to complete in the late 19th century, and the Golden Gate Bridge required similar long-term investment in the 20th. These structures embody persistence, careful iteration, and the willingness to stick with a vision far longer than the average consumer today is willing to watch a video clip.
Even in technology, where progress feels rapid, the underlying breakthroughs follow timelines measured in decades, not minutes. The evolution from vacuum tubes to transistors, from transistors to integrated circuits, from CPUs to GPUs, each required generations of researchers and engineers, countless failures, and enormous patience. The semiconductor industry did not leap from one stage to the next overnight. Each transition involved decades of sustained effort, trial and error, and collaborative meandering across multiple disciplines.
The same is true in medicine. Curing diseases is not a task for short attention spans. Vaccines, treatments, and therapies take years of research, testing, and refinement. The development of antibiotics, for example, was the result of painstaking work that unfolded over decades. Even today, efforts to combat cancer, Alzheimer’s, or global pandemics require attention that stretches across labs, institutions, and generations. These are not problems that yield to a quick glance or a fleeting trend.
Educational systems also illustrate the point. Reforming how we teach and learn is not something that happens in a single semester. It requires long cycles of experimentation, feedback, and redesign. It requires persistence in the face of resistance and the humility to keep adjusting. Education is inherently a long game, measured not in moments but in lifetimes. A society that values only quick results will struggle to build educational systems capable of nurturing future generations.
These examples contrast sharply with the cultural trend toward shorter and shorter forms. In art and entertainment, short forms can be powerful. A three-minute song or a quick video can carry enormous impact. But when we apply the same shrinking attention spans to the challenges that define our civilization, we run into trouble. Building infrastructure, curing diseases, developing new technologies, or reforming education cannot be reduced to quick bursts of effort. They demand patience, resilience, and a willingness to stay with the problem for as long as it takes.
As someone who has lived both in the sciences and the arts, I see this tension clearly. I spent ten years in college studying physics and engineering, immersed in the long meandering path of research. Later, I trained as a composer, where the same principle applied. Even if the final product was a short piece of music, the process behind it was long, iterative, and nonlinear. Creation and discovery both require wandering, revisiting, and refining. They demand time.
The problem is that a culture shaped by short attention spans is less likely to support the kind of long-term thinking required for meaningful progress. Investors demand quick returns. Audiences demand instant gratification. Politicians operate on short election cycles. All of these pressures push against the patience needed to solve complex problems. It is easier to fund an app that can capture attention for thirty seconds than to fund a decades-long research project that may not bear fruit until most of the original team has retired.
This is why it is important to remind ourselves that the great achievements of civilization have always required extended attention spans. The pyramids, the bridges, the semiconductors, the educational systems, the cures—none of them would exist if their creators had been unwilling to stay with the work through years of uncertainty and iteration.
There is nothing wrong with short works. I even founded a company called New Short Works to acknowledge that in music, writing, and video, shorter forms can meet audiences where they are. A short work can be a spark, something that delivers concentrated energy in a small space. But when it comes to solving the big problems, sparks are not enough. You need a fire that can burn for years.
