If a society loses the ability to sit with its own thoughts, has something rotten taken hold at the core, or is this just a brighter and louder phase of progress that we have not learned to live with yet?

The average adult attention span now matches roughly eight seconds. Shorter than the number people like to quote for a goldfish. About the length of a single slow breath. In that thin slice of time someone decides whether to stay with a thought, read another sentence, or slide back into the stream of clips, alerts, and tabs.

This is more than an odd trivia fact. It shows up in relationships that never deepen, careers that stall on half finished projects, health plans that fall apart after three days, and identities built from fragments of content instead of lived experience. People struggle to read a full paragraph. Many cannot finish a simple task without touching their phone. Silence feels unsafe. Long term goals lose to quick hits of novelty.

Marketing sits right in the middle of this culture. Your message enters the same mental space that can no longer focus. Big …