“Somewhere in the past decade or two (pick your own cultural ruin-marker), it stopped being a side quirk that people don’t listen and became a full-blown civic emergency, an extinction-level collapse of attention, curiosity, and the basic mammalian ability to register, or have any interest whatsoever in, another person’s interior life.”
I got all the way to “as I’ve been writing about for years …” before I clocked this as something I won’t bother to finish.
Humans as a species have never listed as the lead quote implies. We’re a shallow species whose interpersonal communication is far more of a handshake than a learned debate. If you go against someone else’s notions you may, at best, get them to remember a short phrase. (And if you’re really lucky and repeat a phrase a few times, it may even be one that accurately reflects your position!)
I got a little bit further and it turned into, “all the ways I wasted time as a kid are superior to the ways that people waste time today”
And this is coming from someone who did the exact same things around the same time as them. I loved those times, but, they were described with such an air of superiority that they don’t really deserve.
Lots of people listen, and lots of people don’t.