The Death of Attention

Why can’t people sit with anything anymore—not silence, not discomfort, not a difficult feeling, not even a single uninterrupted thought?

Most don’t notice it happening. They scroll past conversations before they begin. They interrupt themselves mid-thought. They change the subject the moment something gets hard. They can’t finish a sentence, a moment, a process. They flinch away from their own experience before it ever asks something of them.

In this episode of Inclarity Podcast, psychology professor and author RJ Starr explores the psychological and cultural collapse of staying power. This isn’t just about short attention spans or technology. It’s about a deeper kind of erosion—a breakdown in our ability to hold presence with what is unresolved, complex, or emotionally real.

We trace the roots of this fracture: emotional avoidance, overstimulation, the commodification of time, and the reward circuitry of digital life. Many were never taught how to stay with grief, with ambiguity, or with silence. So they don’t. They flee. And that flight has become second nature.

But what happens to a person—or a culture—that can no longer remain present? What’s lost when we abandon the moment before it has time to form meaning?

RJ Starr unpacks the consequences with clarity and urgency. When people can't sit with a feeling, they lose emotional depth. When they can’t follow a thought to completion, they lose cognitive coherence. When they can’t tolerate pauses in conversation, they lose intimacy. When they can’t stay with someone else's truth, they lose empathy. When they can’t sit in uncertainty, they lose complexity.

And when they lose all of that, they begin to lose themselves.

The Death of Attention isn’t just a critique of distraction—it’s a diagnosis of emotional disconnection and cultural fragmentation. This episode offers not solutions, but clarity. Clarity about what staying means. Clarity about what we’re losing when we stop doing it. And clarity about why this capacity—often dismissed as simple patience—is actually the psychological foundation of depth, presence, and meaning itself.

Listen now to Inclarity Podcast with Professor RJ Starr.