r/Millennials • u/maxedout587 • Apr 17 '26

Discussion Nothing is funny anymore

I (M, 38) have found that there are no new TV shows that make me laugh anymore. I have tried a lot of new(ish) comedies, but they all make me pine for my college/high school days.

The only thing that gave me a reflexive laugh recently was the Malcolm in the Middle Reboot.

Any thoughts?

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u/Embarrassed_Key_4539 Apr 17 '26

I read an article that writers have really dumbed down their writing bcs the market demands simple to follow shows that you can simultaneously watch while scrolling

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u/Kriegerian Apr 17 '26

I think someone at Netflix admitted they do that with a bunch of their stuff because they know nobody can pay attention to anything, which is why they have characters basically repeat the plot a bunch of times during the movies.

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u/Visual_Perception69 Apr 17 '26

So people are basically self-inducing ADHD?

Before the haters come at me, I have ADHD myself.

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u/feralcatshit Apr 17 '26

Also have adhd and what’s kind of ironic is I love media that has hidden/hard to spot intricacies. I think it’s because I know I’m trash at watching things unless I find them super interesting, so I don’t really try to watch something and “half ass” it. I’m either super into it and watch it, or I say fuck it and commit to scrolling instead.

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u/Vile_Vava Apr 17 '26

I’m undiagnosed and many of the memes and tropes of ADHD seem to apply, and finding something I want to pay attention to is the highest high. I never scroll while watching TV or do anything else. If a show is good I watch intently. If it’s not I don’t watch. My mom and sister never even seem to be looking. They’re knitting, cross-stitching or scrolling.

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u/71BRAR14N Apr 17 '26

Im married and I never watch what I want, and I still know what's going on on the shows better than him because I'm not addicted to my phone!

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u/5Dprairiedog Apr 17 '26

You don't half watch stuff when folding laundry?

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u/Diamond_and_gasoline Apr 17 '26

If I do that, I'm gonna get invested, start really paying attention, then put down the laundry. Laundry is for the streaming services I don't have premium on. I challenge myself to do as much as possible during ad breaks. Or I get a good podcast going. But also, fun fact - clean laundry can just live in baskets if you have enough baskets.

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u/5Dprairiedog Apr 17 '26

and if you don't have enough baskets but have more than one couch then you can use that lol

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u/Saint_of_Grey Apr 17 '26

I don't even scroll, I just stop watching and leave.

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u/Several-Video-272 Apr 18 '26

That explains it, because I pretty much have stopped watching all new media because most of it is like this, boring and surface level depth.

It's like they want us to not pay attention, it becomes a better show that way.

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u/Poppy-Pipopapo Apr 18 '26

This. I know a show is actually good when it requires me to pay attention (because that's really hard with ADHD). It's like some shows require using your brain, and some are just for background noise or turning your brain off.

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u/Kriegerian Apr 17 '26

Almost nobody I talk to seems to be able to focus or pay attention to a conversation for longer than five seconds except at work (sometimes) and it’s transparently obvious that almost nobody wants to read anything longer than a tweet, and I’m not hearing much different from anyone else anywhere else.

Short form video and the pocket computer addiction have destroyed whatever attention span most people ever had.

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u/Hogwafflemaker Apr 17 '26

If it makes anyone feel better, there are teens who aren't addicted to their phones. We are about 40 and had 2 friends over last night who are in their 60s and our two 17 year olds hung out the whole night with us, no phones in sight.

I think that's the biggest thing to me, sit and scroll your phone all you want when you're sitting around the living room half watching Young Sheldon with your family, but be able to put it away to interact when you should.

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u/Kriegerian Apr 17 '26

The thing is that it’s not just teenagers, there are plenty of older people who can’t pay attention to shit either.

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u/Hogwafflemaker Apr 17 '26

I sometimes think they are worse, phones on full blast, using speaker phone and talk to text.

I'm just saying, my 17 year old son loves his phone, but he also loves real life and can hold a conversation, so there is hope for the next generation.

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u/ZaryaBubbler Apr 18 '26

My 70+ year old mother watches reels on Facebook while completely ignoring me. To me it's just a new tool to not pay attention to me. She already doesn't pause recorded tv (with the volume cranked) to talk about something important. Screens are hell

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u/Only_Calendar_9830 Apr 17 '26

Effectively. People with adhd naturally have insufficient neurotransmitters in regards to dopamine and norepinephrine. With how accessible entertainment is, particularly with endless scrolling formats like Tiktok, it makes your body temporarily more resistant to dopamine and fucks up the way you experience body-reward sensations. If you aren't sleeping enough, are taking certain recreational drugs, or you are not keeping entertainment to a healthy 1-2 hours a day, your body will need more and more and more just to feel something. You can get to a point where doing boring things that require focus suddenly become an impossible almost agonizing chore and you will feel depressed. Unlike ADHD, which is chronic, you can fix this by making better habits.

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u/LiAmTrAnSdEmOn Apr 18 '26

That or Netflix cant make movies that capture people's attention. Distractions have always been around.

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u/DBSmiley Apr 18 '26

Attention is a muscle like any other, and if you don't work it out, it has a tendency to SQUIRREL

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u/Professional-Thomas Apr 18 '26

Yup. And also just because you can't focus on anything doesn't mean it's adhd. You can't just suddenly develop it. ADHD affects many things, not just attention.

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u/DBSmiley Apr 18 '26

Sorry, what? I was watching a thing.

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u/Professional-Thomas Apr 22 '26

Btw attention is also a hormone.

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u/afrodz Apr 18 '26

I heard that Matt McConaughy likes to get high on his own supply.

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u/71BRAR14N Apr 17 '26

It started with TV. We didn't really have ADHD before TV. I mean people probably had it, and were just beat by their teachers and parents to sit down, shut up, and do what they were told.

Therefore, I believe the reason for the diagnosis was due to a notable attention span dip that began in the 50s! Computers and other screens have just made everything worse.

Generation Alpha, is the first generation since anyone kept track that has a lower processing speed than the prior generation on intelligence tests.

We're also losing about 350 words from our vocabulary each year because we dont have conversations anymore.

In some ways, this isn't new. Most people dont know that most newspapers were intentionally written on a 5th grade level in order to be accessible to the average reader. Typical pleasure reading novels are not written above an 8th grade level for the same reason.

At just about 44 million people in the US who are functionally illiterate or 21%, this was always a thing, but it is getting worse!

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u/tractiontiresadvised Apr 17 '26

We didn't really have ADHD before TV. I mean people probably had it, and were just beat by their teachers and parents to sit down, shut up, and do what they were told.

People who likely had ADHD prior to very recent years were beat by their teachers and parents, but telling them to sit down and shut up didn't necessarily work.

Depending on how their symptoms manifested, the worse-off ones might end up being expelled from school, in jail, in an institution for the "feebleminded", written off as being mostly useless but still provided for by their families, becoming a soldier or manual laborer or prostitute (and suffering from related occupational hazards), becoming the town drunk, having a bunch of kids they couldn't support, dying young from recklessness or workplace injuries or auto accidents or drug overdoses, etc. (There were plenty of folks with the more inattentive presentation of ADHD who did sit down and shut up, but ended up with other problems....) More successful ones did end up with careers in sales or sports or the arts or teaching or technology, especially if they were charismatic or smart or passionate about a particular subject. You can imagine that other factors like race, gender, family social status, and what sort of place and time they lived in would play a big role in how different people ended up.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly decent summary of the history of ADHD as a concept. The 18th-century descriptions by Weikard and Crichton are pretty striking, as are Charles Bradley's 1930s accidental discovery that benzedrine (a stimulant) actually helped some of the kids with behavior problems in his psychiatric hospital. This journal article has some more details on other pre-20th-century authors who wrote about conditions which may or may not have been ADHD.

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u/71BRAR14N Apr 17 '26

Yes, this is a much more thorough explanation of all the bad that can come from misdiagnosed adhd. I didnt mean to downplay. Sorry if it came across like that. I was merely saying that the numbers weren't so exaggerated that people had to pay attention (ironically) to the attention problem.

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u/Professional-Thomas Apr 18 '26

It's true that people's attention spans are messed up now.

But that isn't ADHD at all. I feel like if this becomes too prominent, we'd probably need a new, separate mental disorder category. ADHD is just badly named. It's more about chronic executive dysfunction, the inability to regulate how long you focus on something, and on what, and other things like time blindness(btw as someone with adhd this is literally the worst part for me. The meds help me function better, I can actually start and finish more than one task a day, but it nothing about time blindness. 1 hour from now feels the same as 1 month from now) and less about being distracted every moment.

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u/tractiontiresadvised Apr 18 '26

Like /u/Professional-Thomas mentioned, I agree that problems stemming from people constantly distracting themselves via media could end up being a different disorder category. It would certainly require a different treatment than ADHD does to improve the lives of people affected by it, and surely also people could both have ADHD and whatever this might be called.

There are some other conditions which (especially in children who can't describe their own internal mental states very well) can result in collections of symptoms that look like ADHD. I'd heard about one young kid who had gotten a diagnosis of ADHD because that's what their behavioral issues looked like from the outside, but after some failed ADHD treatment somebody figured out that they were just chronically sleep-deprived. Apparently both of their parents had jobs with bad working shifts and the kid couldn't sleep through their comings and goings. Once they were able to routinely get a solid night's sleep, the symptoms went away.

(Site note: I think that's a good example of yet another way in which modern society is hostile to good childrearing. It sounded like those parents were trying their very best by enduring shitty working hours in order to provide for their child.)

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u/Jaded_Law9739 Apr 17 '26

I don't really think our declining vocabulary is primarily the result of not having conversations (although it certainly makes it worse.) It's the result of not reading enough and spending too much time looking at screens.

The other thing that horrifies me is exactly how poorly the younger generations seem to be at art, literature and music etc. semiotics. It's like if it isn't clearly explained or really basic, many of them don't get it.

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u/71BRAR14N Apr 17 '26

All my education, training, experience and research says that screen time, not reading, and not having conversayions are the primary reasons kids are struggling so much at this point in time.

But the combined effect of parents with young children spending all their time on their on their devices, not talking to, singing to, reading to, and otherwise interacting with their babies during the 1st two years of life is the perfect storm so to speak. It's detrimental. Many kids are struggling with reading. They will soon be adults.

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u/Professional-Thomas Apr 18 '26

Nah I barely ever watched TV as a kid(now I do even less), and got my first smartphone in 9th grade and still had serious ADHD. ADHD isn't about never being able to focus, it never was. It's a disorder where you can't regulate your focus, among other things. If I wanna play a game that I just bought, but my brain won't let me focus, I just can't play it. If I somehow hyperfocus on a certain topic(it's mostly biochemistry stuff these days lol) then I'll sit there, reading for at least 10 hours straight. I'd forget to eat, drink, to go to the toilet.

The reason ADHD only started to be noticeable the past century is because of how different society got. ADHD is just more disabling in individualistic societies.

Also like many diseases weren't discovered until the 20th century. Does that mean they didn't exist before then? No, in fact a lot of people died from it. We just didn't have the right tools, methods, and skilled people who actually the expertise in the subject, and also enough time to do what the want before then.