What 20 Years of Writing Has Taught Me About Attention, Integrity, and the Digital Age

Reflections on the Decline of Attention Spans and the Rise of Image Over Substance

The Lost Art of Holding Attention

I remember the days before social media, before attention spans were shortened and people expected you to condense years of knowledge, experience, and research into a 60-90 second video or a 250-character social media post.

My online writing journey began what seems like ages ago now, in 2005, when I signed up for my first WordPress blog.

I had no plan to monetize, market, or brand myself; I had a genuine love of reading, learning, and writing, and wanted to share what I learned with others.

Most of my articles back then were around 4,000 words, and I had a consistent readership that kept growing.

No one complained that they were “too long”; instead, they appreciated the work I put into writing.

Eventually, I created my own website and blog.

Informational Awareness Isn’t Awakening

Over the past 30 years, I have read hundreds of books on psycho-spiritual, esoteric, and occult topics and have undergone an intense inner process of applying this work to myself, moving beyond informational knowledge into embodied practice.

It is an ongoing journey of breakdowns, dark nights of the soul, epiphanies, and breakthroughs, with new layers constantly being shed and revealed according to the Law of Ascent and Descent.

I would never claim to have fully integrated my shadow or to be truly ‘awake.’ Anyone who makes such a claim is caught in self-delusion.

For the record, I don’t equate being ‘aware’ of corruption or lies in the world through intellectual information with being awake.

The word ‘awake’ is one of the most abused terms today, much like the words God or Love.

At best, this informational awareness may be a form of initial ‘awakening’, but it is still a baby step. From an esoteric perspective, it doesn’t even amount to having taken the ‘red pill.’

It’s one thing to confront the lies out there in the world. The real work begins when you face the lies you tell yourself, and that’s where you meet the greatest resistance, from the ‘charlatan within,’ as Sri Aurobindo called it, or from wetiko working through you.

Ironically, until you have sincerely faced the lies within, you cannot clearly discern truth from falsehood in the outer world. Your perception will be clouded by shadow projections, unconscious wounds, and conditioning.

"In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant, incessant lies he tells himself."

- Gurdjieff

The [inner] work doesn’t stop. It becomes more refined and nuanced, and the Divine doesn’t reveal all at once, including the darkness and shadow one must confront.

We have discussed this topic in our podcast, “What You Lose When Waking Up (And What You Gain)”

Writing with Depth in an Age of Superficiality

I am still reading and learning every day. It is the first thing I do when I wake up, after my morning walk with my dog, meditation, and prayer, before I even look at my phone, turn on my computer, or go online.

Reading books has been part of my life for decades. I appreciate how it shapes my thinking, helps my attention, inspires my inner work, helps me to process, and fuels my creativity in ways that social media scrolling never will. It’s like food for the soul.

Fueled by inspiration and creativity, I always used writing to help me organize my thoughts and share my experiences and insights. I wanted to share what I learned with others.

Back then, I never counted words in my articles, nor did I care. Some were 2,000 or 6,000 words, others 10,000, and some turned into deep-dive essays of 20,000 or even 30,000 words.

I wasn’t concerned with what I ‘should’ write so that others would like it or what might attract more readers, and I’m still not. I only write about what I feel compelled to explore or whatever inspires me.

People seemed to resonate with it, and my readership and subscription list grew organically.

When I began writing in my 20s, 30s, and into my mid-40s, I never thought of using it to sell or market anything. It was about the joy of studying, learning, experiencing, creating, and writing.

The Rise of Influencers and the Decline of Substance

Around 2015, I noticed that the climate was starting to shift.

Social media took off, especially with the rise of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I began to use some of these platforms to post my articles, primarily using Facebook, as it allowed for longer-form content.

During that time, I noticed a new phenomenon emerging: the rise of a wave of what are known as “influencers.”

These mostly consisted of people who seemed not to put much work into deep learning, nor did they take the time or have the knowledge to write longer articles.

Instead, they focused solely on generating likes via “hot takes,” “social commentary,” and trying to create the right viral video or tweet to amass more followers.

Reaching as many people as possible quickly became more important than the quality of content.

Then TikTok arrived, lowering the attention span even further to 30 to 90-second videos. Other social media platforms followed.

To be clear, I have nothing against memes or short videos. They can be insightful and even funny. I use them too. But if that becomes all you consume and create, or if you mainly create these to chase likes and popularity, that often broadcasts a lack of substance.

The people who make these videos or superficial short posts often have not deeply studied or learned anything themselves, but rather are just skilled at making endless soundbites and tweets that will give them the “appearance” of being knowledgeable while they mostly copy others.

As short-form content and memes became more popular, I began receiving complaints that my articles were too long. That I should shorten them, because people did not have time to read them.

I found it to be a bizarre and entitled request, especially since I always put a lot of time, energy, and research into everything I wrote–and I gave it away for free.

But for some, it was not enough.

On Facebook, I noticed people referring to some of my posts, around 500 words, as ‘articles that are too long to read.’ What I saw as a short blurb, they were already calling an ‘article.’

It got worse. Even articles of 2,000 words on my website, which I considered to be short, were considered “too long.”

When people reposted links to my articles on social media, they sometimes added warnings about a “good, but very long article,” and others replied with “TL;DR.”

Since when is a 2,000-word article considered very long? I guess it’s all relative and depends on the eye of the beholder.

That is when I realized how drastically attention spans and the ability to focus were eroding, and how people were justifying their lack of reading and comprehension skills by placing demands upon me to summarize my articles for them.

However, most of the topics I cover require depth and cannot be summarized into a TikTok video, a Tweet, a 10-point bulleted list, or an Instagram carousel.

AI, Plagiarism, and the Erosion of Integrity

On top of that, large influencer accounts began copying sections of my articles and posting them under their names on social media without credit. Inadvertently, I helped them monetize through my work.

Some of my longer articles (20,000 - 30,000 words) on my website were stolen and sold as ebooks on Amazon under a different name, with only the title changed.

When I have confronted others on social media about plagiarism in the past, I’ve noticed it seems to be based on a lack of conscience.

Many will use the excuse “well, everyone is doing it, so it’s okay” or the spiritual bypass of “nothing belongs to you anyway, why does it matter if someone gives you credit?” They normalize stealing, imitating, and a lack of integrity.

I also notice many new individuals entering the scene now, marketing psycho-spiritual concepts mainly as a way to build a brand and sell products or services, especially those in their 20s and early 30s.

These individuals often have minimal real-life experience, nor do they seem capable of demonstrating a depth of knowledge on the topics they discuss, nor do they create any in-depth content on their own.

Many of them seem to create brands by imitating and copying others, without first paying their dues by taking the time to learn, study, and engage in the inner process, for its own sake first, not to create a “brand” out of it.

Carl Jung understood that you can’t rush life or skip lessons:

“Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.”

- Carl Jung

In my opinion, if your driving force is to get likes, clicks, views, followers, and monetization, and this overrides the passion and love for learning and what you do, the matrix “has you” entirely in the grip of Ahriman, Steiner’s “spirit of darkness” representing the force of pure materialism.

On the other side of the coin, if you believe everything should be free, feel entitled to other people’s time and energy, or cling to the distorted spiritual idea that ‘money is evil’ or that ‘knowledge’ and anything ‘spiritual’ should come without cost, you’ve fallen into another delusion, along with some socialist or communist programming.

(The whole “money” subject and “payment” (from an esoteric perspective) is a whole other topic of its own, which I will address in another article.)

Discernment in the Time of Artificial Everything

We have now entered the age of AI, with an exponential surge in AI-generated content.

Suddenly, people who have never truly written anything are putting out lengthy articles and social media posts created entirely by ChatGPT or similar programs.

On a side note, I am not anti-AI, either. It’s not black or white for me. AI can be a helpful tool. We have talked about the AI topic in a more nuanced way in this podcast.

However, what I see most often is the lure of quick content, with many using it to produce quantity over quality, appealing again to the appearance of having knowledge or insight, rather than going through the longer process of deep learning and developing character, authenticity, and substance from that inner process.

As AI-generated content and influencers increasingly build their careers on image, superficial short-form content, and viral shorts, there will be a growing demand for original, human, long-form content created by people with genuine wisdom and life experience. This shift is already becoming visible on platforms like Substack.

This is all part of the splitting of humanity, which I have been writing about since 2016, and it is going to intensify.

In times like these, it is even more critical and discerning with whom we follow. Just because someone makes a lot of interesting tweets or is good at making viral videos doesn’t mean they actually have any idea what they are talking about.

What shows real knowledge is a deeper understanding of a topic, meaning you could talk about it for hours, or write about it in-depth in thousands of words, lacing your own personal experiences and insights throughout.

In times like these, with shorter attention spans and a decline in sincerity and integrity, we become more susceptible to hooks, “hot takes,” and appearance over substance, leaving us vulnerable to pretenders as artificial as any AI bot.

If we want to develop the discernment to recognize superficial performance versus the real thing in a world where pathology has been normalized, we must cultivate depth within ourselves.

That means strengthening our Self-connection through psycho-spiritual inner work, sharpening our focus, our ability to hold attention, and expanding our capacity for learning.

Only then can we discern the real from the unreal, the performers from those with genuine wisdom, and true embodied knowledge from the narcissistic performance and appearances that have become normalized in our cult-ure.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

- Krishnamurti

The Illusion of Progress

Our greatest blind spot is mistaking technological advancement for progress in consciousness, as if humanity were at the peak of its evolutionary trajectory.

It is a cunning deception, especially for those who are solely externally oriented and stuck in a materialistic worldview.

In truth, we have been in a long descent for thousands of years, a regression in consciousness that can be seen as a form of devolution.

Yet this descent is not an error or ‘mistake.’ It is part of a larger evolutionary arc, the spiritualization of body, mind, life, and matter according to Divine Will. The darkness we are in now is not the end. It is the threshold before the light breaks through.

However, if we don’t learn our lessons during this Time of Transition, we might experience again what Sri Aurobindo & The Mother called a “dark night of civilization” with the Divine pressing the “reset button” as it has happened many times before.

“I cannot promise that the Divine’s Will is to preserve the current civilization. The present civilization must change, but whether by destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater truth is the issue.”

- Sri Aurobindo

But that is another story for another time.