As far as I'm aware, average book sales per capita have never been higher. The headline of this article is a wonderful example of how news outlets are scare-mongering for clicks. People are reading more, actually, and even those not buying books are reading thousands more words per day on their smartphones than they would ever have before. Sure, it's not high literature, but that's a majority of human communication. Newspaper sales have declined, but news readership among young people has massively expanded.<p>I'm also quite dubious of the attention-span theory. It doesn't seem to have much science behind it, only cultural momentum. The most interesting study I read recently was how the proximity of smartphones can diminish cognitive abilities. But that, to me, is a question of notifications and social functions. [Edit: I just saw The Shallows below, I'll look into it]<p>We are more interconnected than ever. We can instantly find stimulating discussion on an incredible depth of topics. We read more than ever. What we are experiencing, in my reading, is a measurement/phenomena bias. Now we can find out what the [Jones' next door] think of what's on the news, which disappoints us, rather than allowing ourselves to consider it private and so never give it a second thought. It's not necessarily that the world, or humans, have changed in some ground-breaking, global-depression-explaining manner - simply that the doors to our opinions and habits are more open than before.<p>Perhaps this does indeed have some effect, in a more permanent sense. But I regard this more as a function of the tendency for people to out-source beliefs. It only takes an hour or two to find the worst of all humanity, and the best. The drafty corridors between people these days carry beliefs across the degrees of separation faster than ever before. My pet theory is it's the beliefs about ones capabilities or 'type-destinies' which hurt the emotive liberals for supporting liberal democracies. It's the cultural-state beliefs that hurt the 'realpolitik' conservatives in gripping the real politics. On both accounts, I do think this can be resisted, but it takes time and psychological space that we have replaced for 'productive' work in mostly zero-sum economic activities.<p>When it comes to fashionable (and effective) practices like CBT and meditation, I like to ask whether they are assistive for the human condition generally, or just our present condition. Marrying an internalised locus of control with an ebb-and-flow outlook on life could be the healing function. Or perhaps we simply need to arrest our sense of personal identity, and alight the cultural train every so often.