Sometimes I watch lifestyle vlogs and they’ll say they’re watching Netflix while on their phones. And for me, that alone is mind-boggling. I understand turning the TV on as white noise while scrolling, but how is that count as watching when you aren’t actually watching it?

Honestly, multitasking entertainment is such a difficult concept for me. What are we rushing for? Why does focusing on watching something still require another task on top of it? And y’all, it’s crazy to think that media companies now are actually dumbing down stories so people can “catch up.”

I feel like this is especially true for webtoons. From personal experience, webtoons are very easy to follow because the plots are often not that complicated. They’re very on-the-nose, and I realize the purpose: they’re made for mobile phones, so there isn’t a lot of dialogue and they need to be easy to consume quickly. I also realized that Netflix shows are often designed so you don’t have to concentrate. Creativity gets adjusted so you can do other things and mostly be on your phone.

I remember writing about how I managed to conquer reading while listening to music. Before, I couldn’t for the life of me listen to music while reading. I wanted my entire focus on the book. And people asked me before how I could read one book a day. See, I spent the entire time just reading. My full attention was on it, and that’s what made me a fast reader—because I do one thing at a time.

Even now, when I watch anime or vlogs, I put my concentration fully on what I’m watching. I don’t like being distracted. If you see me on my phone while the TV is on, it’s because I don’t have anything meaningful to watch and I’m just using it as background noise. But that’s deliberate. That’s not how I normally function. When I say I’m going to watch something, I mean it! I give it my full attention!

Second-screen viewing rapidly takes away from meaningful and creative storytelling because plots and dialogue have to be simplified so people can keep up. I know some people don’t have time, but honestly, watching something while doing something else is never going to be 100% effective. It’s such a shame that creatives are losing leverage because people just don’t pay attention anymore. Critical thinking has dipped so much that even entertainment has to be so mindless just so people can follow along. It’s unhinged, and frankly scary, that we’re lowering our media literacy standards because we can’t put down our phones.

I know time is precious, but we’re so obsessed with convenience and simplicity now that we’ve lost the ability to stay still and immerse ourselves. We want to follow current trends on real-time so we can say we know—but do we really know when half the time we aren’t paying attention? I don’t know. I still like watching things with full focus. That’s why if I can’t watch something properly, I just won’t. The repercussions of this habit, combined with everything else, are making our society less functionally literate because we can’t sit down, pay attention to one thing, and actually process what we’re watching anymore.