If you look back over the last 50 years, you could chart the evolution of how many seconds a person can stay focused on one activity before switching to something else. I’ve known since childhood that human beings are born for slow contemplation. As a kid, I could spend hours — or perhaps millions of hours — quietly staring at one of my new Christmas toys, even without touching it. My personal record is three days staring at the giant screw in a toy toolbox. Screws had always seemed small, gray, and boring to me. The screws we had at home weren’t exactly designed to single-handedly hold up the wall of a nuclear power plant, much less capture the imagination of a child. They were tiny cassette-player screws that often vanished and had to be replaced with tape. But that Christmas, I received a toolbox where everything was big and colorful: I could slip my little fingers through the nuts — an excellent training exercise, as I later proved when I carried three donuts on each finger at Dunkin’ Donuts. The box also included several giant red screws, building blocks, and a beautiful drill that could make almost anything spin. Unfortunately, it made a noise unbearable to the adult human ear — I emphasize adult — and it disappeared from my house overnight without explanation, while my parents and siblings maintained a suspicious silence and, certainly, a guilty conscience. It may have been the worst moment of my childhood. It’s awful not to be a writer with a properly troubled childhood, but overall, I grew up in a happy home despite life’s inevitable setbacks. Still, that damned missing drill left me melancholic for a week. Until I forgot about it. But not entirely, apparently, because I’ve just remembered it — 40 years later. I’m not resentful by nature, but I think I’ll bring it up at the next family Christmas dinner. Almost all children regard their little objects as treasures while they’re discovering the world. When a child first notices their own limbs, or the natural world outside — plants, or the sea — they still maintain a quiet, instinctive sense of wonder. Children begin to experience a bit of anxiety when they interact with the artificial world: city traffic, the rumble of a passing train, or a surprise visit from the mother-in-law. From there, the slope is endless. The biggest leap in a child’s development comes when they start interacting with televisions and machines. When they are very young, these devices attract them mainly so they can throw them on the floor — perhaps a form of self-defense for the future. But as they grow, their attention to and observation of the outside world slows down, and their ability to concentrate is increasingly consumed by moving images. (RELATED: Scatterbrains, Screens, and Our Moral Collapse) As a child, we had a method at home to prevent television from turning us into idiots. It was quite effective. After half an hour of cartoons and a snack, a man would press the off button and tell my siblings and me, “Everybody, go study!” Sometimes it was a woman. They were my father and mother, and they were not high-level diplomats ready to negotiate the matter, but elite snipers defending the little heads of their loved ones, armed with a well-aimed slipper. (RELATED: At the Tip of Your Fingers) Today, it makes absolutely no difference that parents have a TV remote. It’s about as effective as if, when we were kids, my father had tried to turn off all the lights in the room by blowing on the bulbs. It’s a tough (or perhaps fascinating) time to be a parent, because evil, alienation, and poison seep into every corner of the house and society at every moment and settle in the little heads of children. I often think the only way to defend them from this torrential downpour of stimuli and bad ideas is not to stand against the massive wall of water, but to build a sturdy protective dam inside their minds, where conscience resides. (RELATED: The Stare That Broke America) I mention all this because I’ve just read a study — yet another one — claiming that our capacity for sustained concentration is at an all-time low. As we’ve grown accustomed to consuming 20-second micro-products on social media, our ability to stay engaged for longer than that with a book, a friend who is speaking, or even a real-life scene unfolding right before our eyes has been severely diminished. Looking back 50 years shows an evolution of this trend that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Younger generations, for instance, don’t understand how a writer makes a living. No one ever has, of course, but right now saying I’m a writer is like saying my job is repairing gramophones. This trend has accelerated so much that I wonder whether we’ll eventually see social-media platforms where videos last less than a second. I suppose that will be the moment when we’ll all need to start taking preventive medication for epilepsy. Although my theory, as a Christian, is that God won’t allow us to become quite that idiotic and thoughtless. Or at least that He’ll bring something good out of all this. Even if it’s just a one-second clip with the text: Paenitemini et credite Evangelio. READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: Today’s Teens: The Generation We’ve Totally Annoyed Bill Gates Has Discovered Something More Profitable Than the Climate Apocalypse Fun Returns to the Press: A Rising Star Announces a New 1929 Crash in the Times