I remember being a kid, watching a long series with hundreds of episodes.
When a new character appeared on screen, the camera would first show their left eye, then their right, then their nose, their mouth, and only after all of that, their full face.
Sometimes it took two whole minutes. I waited with this quiet excitement, wondering who this person could possibly be. I was never bored.
Now though, I’ve noticed my patience while watching films has almost disappeared.
I get restless within the first thirty minutes, constantly waiting for some turning point, wondering why everything is moving so slowly.
I’ve started watching some films at 1.5x or even 2x speed, and even then, it sometimes still feels too slow.
I’ve started scrolling through my phone mid-movie, doing other things in the background which I never used to do.
Luckily or sadly, I’m not alone. Many of my friends and family members say they notice the same thing in themselves. It’s not that we’ve become bad viewers. Something has simply changed.
I believe these behaviors go along with the rise of social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
With the average video running about a minute long, creators began compressing everything down to the bare essentials, terrified of losing attention.
An unspoken rule emerged: if the first eight seconds don’t hook the viewer, they scroll. Even recipe videos, once 10 to 15 minutes long, are now squeezed into sixty-second reels.
Some creators have started shooting entire series with one actor and one to two minutes per episode length. In a way, it’s efficient.
We save time, get the information we need and spend roughly ten times less doing it. Short videos are there when we need a distraction and when we want the time to pass a little faster.
But they’ve made us impatient and restless. We get frustrated by anything that feels slow, always wanting to speed things up, not realizing that in doing so, we’re speeding up our own lives.
We stop enjoying the moment of watching a film with the people we love. We lose the ability to simply be present. I’m not saying we should all delete our social media and sit down to watch slow cinema.
Honestly, I’m not sure I could do that myself. But maybe, to keep from losing things likepatience and the ability to wait, we could start small.
Watch a little less of the endless scroll, and use that time to watch slow and interesting movies instead.
