The Attention-Span Class Divide - The Atlantic

Several months ago, during an Oscar campaign far more memorable than the movie it was promoting, the actor Timothée Chalamet offered up an observation: “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this any more.” Recognizing that he might have just offended some ballet or opera lovers, he added, “I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”<br>Chalamet went on to reference billion-dollar-grossing blockbusters, such as Oppenheimer and Barbie. Beloved as opera and ballet may be, they have a niche audience. I have never, for instance, witnessed gaggles of girlfriends dress like birds to catch a Swan Lake performance the way millions of women swathed themselves in pink to see Barbie.<br>But what people who were annoyed by the ham-fisted comment may have missed—what Chalamet himself missed—is that he is already working in a field of narrowing cultural relevance. Theatrical movie releases have been on the decline since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, dropping from 910 releases in 2019 to 670 in 2025. Box-office sales are shrinking. People are still streaming movies at home, but studios are worried. Feature films are getting longer overall, but scriptwriters are under pressure to keep acts short, with faster cuts designed to keep viewers focused. Chalamet’s comment came in response to the actor Matthew McConaughey, who was lamenting that studios have been trimming first acts to “get to the point,” at the expense of story building. Chalamet was saying that he sympathized with the impulse to adapt in order to keep drawing audiences to the movies.<br>Read: The attention-span panic<br>But it may be too late. The movies were once a working- and middle-class pleasure—cheap Nickelodeon theaters sprung up in the early 1900s in cities dense with immigrants. By the Jazz Age, “movie palaces” brought in wealthy patrons too, and for decades, the cinema was an all-American activity. But today, affluent people are the most likely to say they’ve gone to a movie recently, whereas low-income people are the least likely. In one survey, 78 percent of respondents said that they considered going to the movies a luxury. Meanwhile, millions of people have started watching micro-dramas on TikTok.<br>This may be less a matter of changing tastes than a matter of time and money. I don’t just mean the money it costs to pay for movie tickets and streaming services, at a time when Americans are stretching for gas and eggs. (Last year, the cost of streaming increased almost 20 percent, well above the 2.7 percent inflation rate.) I don’t just mean studios’ money-saving turn to generative AI, which will inevitably lead to a decline in the quality of films. I’m talking about what not having money does to your time, and your ability to spend it.<br>Who can and cannot sit down to watch a movie may seem like a low-stakes issue, but it’s not. Everyone is struggling to get off their phones and pay attention, but some are struggling more than others. The ability to focus is a class issue, and the attention span is undergoing a class divide.<br>The average American reports checking their phone nearly 200 times a day.  Everyone—blue-collar moms, college students, CEOs—suffers from the distractions of carrying around the pinging, blinking pocket-size casinos that our phones have become. While our attention spans have shrunk, however, our brains have not fundamentally changed. Focus, it appears, is a recoverable asset that can be retrieved by shutting out the noise and leaving the casino. And that is much easier for high rollers to do.<br>Money offers the ability to buy expensive gadgets such as second, basic phones and “bricks” that can make smartphones temporarily dumb. But it also means access to resources that don’t look like resources at all: stable work, consistent schedules, chunks of leisure time, agency over how to structure your day. The ability to block out time to focus on emails, make to-do lists, or do in-depth work. To meditate, exercise, or go outside. To commit three hours to seeing a movie in a theater (or a ballet or an opera). These are things that economically stable individuals take for granted, but that evade many struggling Americans.<br>The unemployment rate is hovering around 4.2 percent. But if you add the “functionally unemployed”—which includes anyone making less than a living wage ($26,000 a year) and anyone who wants but can’t get 35 hours or more of guaranteed work a week—then that figure rises to about 25 percent. Nearly 30 percent of Americans are employed in gig work, which promises flexibility and freedom but is more commonly defined by a lack of steady hours and the need to constantly be on call.<br>Americans are spending their days hustling and waiting for the opportunity to hustle, their days broken up into unpredictable units of work and languishing. That’s stressful, and stress limits the ability to...