Let me tell you a story. This is supposed to be good.

The story takes place on a random street in China, where this dude, who is our protagonist, is eating at a food stall.

He eats with such intensity that even when a hot girl wants to sit next to him, he remains undistracted

Suddenly, a group of scary looking thugs come out of nowhere.

Everyone runs away, except our protagonist, who just sits there and continues to eat

You might wonder why he has the survival instinct of a gold fish; The answer is that he is secretly overpowered

Indeed when the fight breaks out, he easily takes out the thugs and ends the fight with this uh grappling technique

But then the thugs backup arrives; still our protagonist remains clam.

He makes a phone call, which conjures up this car from which a well dressed old guy walks out with a hot girl and an entourage of office workers

They walk up to our protagonist and greet him with the etiquette from 14th century China before revealing the punchline

You see this old guy works for our protagonist. These street thugs work for this old guy

Which means that our protagonist has been the street thugs’ boss all along

The thugs were visibly troubled by this revelation; he trembles as he falls to the ground, and wails in fear and agony before being dragged away

As a viewer I’m supposed to find all this very satisfying to watch

And if you like this show, you’ll be happy to hear that there are 94 episodes of this stuff

To watch the next episode you just need scroll down like this, the same way you would scroll on TikTok.

You can watch the first 13 episodes for free, but then you’ll need to pay a whopping 20 cents to unlock each additional episode

So, how do you feel about this show so far? Would you pay to watch the rest?

Well in any case more than a million people did

This particular show, titled Matchless, generated more than 14 million dollars of revenue in just 8 days after its release in 2023. And it did all that with a budget of just 70 thousand dollars and took less than 2 weeks to film.

Each episode of a Short drama is typically 1 to 3 min long, and made for the vertical phone screens. Viewers can watch them the same way they scroll on TikTok.

The most common ways short dramas monetize is to have the initial episodes for free, then paywall the remaining ones with a small fee. The paywalled episodes typically start right after a cliff hanger to maximum conversion.

Short dramas first appeared in China around 2018. The pay-for-view business model solidified around 2020s, at which point the industry began to grow exponentially, from half a billion to 7 Billion dollars in just 4 years

By 2024, Chinese short drama revenue had surpassed their domestic box office

Making it a major part of the Chinese entertainment sector

Short dramas are not as big outside of China, but still a legitimate industry, especially in terms of growth

Short drama Apps like ReelShort and DramaBox first entered the western market in 2022

By Q1 of last year, their revenue increased by something like 8000% compared to the year before, and this year they are on track to make 3 B dollars of revenue, roughly tripling that of last year

Now as a new industry short dramas have minimal gate keeping compared to traditional industries like Hollywood. So it attracted a lot of new media talents like actors, directors, and writers, since its opportunities are more accessible to newcomers

short dramas also have much lower budget and shorter production timeline compared to traditional movies and TV shows. Many entrepreneurs gravitate towards the industry for that reason because it lets them bootstrap their projects and return on their investments quicker, ship at higher volumes and iterate at faster speeds

At some point the short drama industry was almost seen as a gold rush in China, where the media reports were full of get rich quick stories.

These sentiments encouraged new entrants which further fueled the industry’s rapid growth

Now the rise of the Short drama has made some people worried

They think that these short dramas are not good quality content, but rather like brain rot or  digital slop at scale

They worry that short dramas might end up replacing long form movies and TV shows, which could be bad for the modern culture of art and entertainment.

And maybe even aggravate our already declining attention span

So in today’s video, I want to dive into the rise of short dramas, what it represents our society and what we can learn from this phenomenon

First of all regardless of one’s taste, it doesn’t seem wrong to criticize short drama’s quality,

If you start watching short dramas, it wouldn’t take long for you to realize that these are probably not the best entertainment human creativity has to offer

the plot of short dramas for example, tend to be formulaic and fall into a few predictable patterns.

For the male audience we have the “I’m an underestimated middle-aged guy who turns out to be powerful and respected, and mog everybody” trope

For the female audience there is the “I’m an ordinary and mistreated girl but a powerful man/Billionaire/Vampire falls in love with me. He protects me and helps me take revenge on all the bitches who looked down on me before.” kind of plotline

There are a few more of these formulas but you get the idea. These shows tend to be overly dramatic, with the plot twists and cliff hangers of a typical soap opera condensed to under 3 minutes

As a result, online discourse often refers to short dramas as some variation of brainrot with terms such as

脑残短剧 (brain-dead short dramas), 毒剧 (poison dramas), 电子榨菜 (electronic pickled vegetables = junk food side dish), or digital fast foods

Now I like these food analogies, although I don’t think the comparison to fast food is entirely accurate.

fast food is after all a meal that takes roughly the same amount of time to eat as any other meal.

I think a better analogy might be to compare short dramas and other short form content to snacks. And movies, TV shows, and other long form content to meals

Inspecting this snack vs meal analogy turns out to be revealing about why short dramas tend to be so sloppy

If we look at how we consume meals, for instance

To eat a meal, we usually need to be deliberate about it. We need to make time for it, clear some space on a table, sit down in front of it, and then eat it.

We do the same when we consume long form content. we usually need to decide to watch a movie or TV show or read a book. Free up some time and sit in front of the content to consume it

As a result, chefs that cook meals, and producers that make long form content are more likely to put depth and nuance into their products, knowing that their consumers are more likely to be in a mindspace to appreciate them.

Now snacks, on the other hand, are consumed in a much more fragmented fashion

We don’t need to be deliberate about eating snacks.

·         For people that have snacks around the house

·         they reach for them throughout the day

·         They don’t need to decide to do it, or make time for it

·         They can even snack while doing something else

·         In other words, snacking just sort of happens

same thing for short form content consumption

·         People scroll on their phones when they are waiting in line, or on a commute

·         Or when they are in a boring meeting 

·         people scroll throughout the day in between activities or during activies, most of the time unconsciously without having decided to do it

So although it’s hard to eat a meal or read a book by accident. It’s quite easy to snack or scroll by accident.

In fact personally I only scroll by accident.

I never decide to start scrolling but I always find myself scrolling, and then wake up in the middle of a scrolling session feeling totally confused about how I’ve come to lose the last 2 hours

And that’s apparently not an uncommon experience

Because this is how snacks and short form content are consumed, their producers naturally prioritize instant gratification over depth and nuance.

This is not to say that there are no high quality snacks or deep and nuanced short form content, but they tend to be the minority

This is especially so when a new category of short form content, in this case short drama, emerges, the majority of the products that fill into that space tend towards brainrot

Now the fact that there are a lot of low quality snacks and short form content out there isn’t necessarily a problem in principle

In a free society, people should be allowed to make low quality products. And consumers are free to choose to buy them or not.

But the problem is that the customers’ ability to choose is starting to erode

There are snack companies for example that hire teams of PHDs who employ tools at the frontiers of modern science to make their products as addictive as possible. (

Some go so far as to attempt to remove the satiation points from their foods such that a person can keep consuming the snacks without feeling naturally satiated (

So their entire business models are based on tricking you to start eating, and once you start, to prevent you from stopping

So yes in theory you are a free person and can choose not to eat foods that are bad for your health. But in practice, an average person’s will power is limited compared to these corporation’s budget for research and development.

It’s part of the reason why it’s so hard to lose weight, and why there is an obesity epidemic in many western societies 

Now just like snacks, a lot of short form content, like short dramas, are in the business of tricking you to start engaging and, once you start, to prevent you from stopping;

The most competent technology companies in our societies with the deepest pockets are employing the smartest people and dedicating billions of dollars into figuring out ways to get you to glue to your screens.

And over the last decade they’ve created this habit of doom scrolling on a societal scale fueled by the primal human emotions that trigger us.

They’ve created what looks like an ecosystem that profits off of the predation of your attention.

And short dramas just comes along and seamlessly plugs itself into this ecosystem. That’s part of the reason why it was able to grow so rapidly

Now on a personal level, having our time and attention preyed upon in this way is a gigantic and unfortunate waste of time

Chris Williamson was talking about this blog post by Bronnie ware, who was a palliative care nurse. After working with people who were dying for many years, Bronnie published this blog post summarizing the top five most common regrets of the dying

This is the list. It has things like

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

And

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

I think most of us will find these regrets intuitive to understand

Now one thing Chris mentioned is that in a couple of decades, it’s likely that ‘I wish I had not spent so much time on my phone’ would be added to this list.

I agree

I mean I’m not even dead yet and I’m already regretting how much time I’ve spent on my phone

The average US adult apparently spends 4 and a half hours per day on their phone

 That’s about a quarter of a person’s waking day, and as a first approximation their life.

If I die at the age of 80, and I realize that I’ve spent 20 of my 80 years staring at a 6 inch screen in the palm of my hand. What am I to do with that information.

That’s horrifying

Now part of the reasons our screens can capture so much of our attention is because it convinces us that we are having a proximity of life on them

The truth is that our digital devices do simulate life to some extent, and they are getting better at it everyday. Video games are becoming more realistic, especially with technologies like VR and AR.

But still our screens are not yet good enough to fully replace the richness and depth of real life

What they are good at doing though, is to be just good enough that it removes our motivation to exert effort in the real world to experience the richness of real life.

In other words it traps us into this “local maximum” of simulated experiences, that’s not as good as the real thing, but good enough that we no longer want to bother with the real thing

And this obviously causes problems on a societal scale

We’ve all heard about the decreasing attention span

This largely comes from Gloria Mark’s work who’s tracked the decreasing adult attention span over the last few decades. These are adults, like office workers and university students

 But we are seeing the same trend in kids. Some teachers of k-12 are now having to change the way they teach because the newer cohorts of students’ attention span can’t keep up with the existing teaching process

Even professors at elite universities are having to reduce the amount of readings they assign because college students apparently can’t handle large amounts of readings

Now there is an optimistic way to interpret this that I learned from Eric Weinstein

Eric suggests that perhaps we are not losing our ability to pay attention, rather we are raising the bar for what we consider to be worthy of our attention

In other words, maybe the assigned readings from the professor are just boring. That’s why the students don’t want to read it

Because these are the same students who will watch all 8 seasons of game of thrones, and write a 3000 word reddit post about how bad the last season is

So maybe what we are losing isn’t our ability to focus, but our ability to tolerate boredom

Perhaps boredom is the centre of the bull’s eye here.

Because one thing that exists in real life that categorically does not exist in the simulation of life on our screens is boredom

We as consumers of digital content, reach for our screens, in large part, to escape boredom.

The producers of digital content know this, so they actively try to remove boredom from all of their products, because the moment their content is boring, we scroll away

So both the consumers and the producers of digital content avoid boredom like the plague

Everyone is scared of boredom these days

And on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with our active divorce from boredom

After all we seem to only be bored when there’s nothing going on.

So supposedly we don’t miss much by avoiding boredom

The problem though is that life is boring. Real life, I mean

And the physical world, which happens to be the one we live in, is full of boredom

Someone has to build the next iphone and draft the next government policies and fix the plumbing when it breaks. And something tells me that those tasks are not always as exciting as watching the game of thrones.

So until AI and robots become good enough to do all of those things for us and we can plug ourselves permanently into our digital simulations, we need to retain our ability to work with boredom out of necessity

And beyond that, I think there are profound values in boredom. This point might be a bit counterintuitive.

There’s a scene in the movie the secret life of walter mitty, where walter ,the protagonist is sitting with a character named Sean in the Himalayas.

Sean is a photographer who’s trying photograph a snow leopard

Now snow leopards are known as ghost cats because they are notroruioulsy elusive. It’s extremely rare to see one.

So Sean tells Walter that they have to be very quiet and still while they wait, and if they are luck maybe they’ll get to see the snow leopard

And when the snow leopard finally shows up, Walter and Sean are basically in awe of this ephemeral beauty that’s in front of them

It’s at this point that Sean utters one of my favourite lines of any movies. He says “beautiful things don’t ask for attention”

Now that’s not strictly true. Some beautiful things do ask for attention. Some things can be beautiful in an ostentatious way that scream for attention. Their beauty shines so brightly that it’s hard to ignore so to speak

I don’t worry about that kind of beauty because it’s hard to miss them in the first place. They’ll end up getting the appreciation they deserve

But some beautiful things are like snow leopards. They don’t ask for attention. The algorithms don’t serve them up to you packaged in an attractive thumbnail.

And I’m afraid that the only way to access them is through boredom.

Who knows how long Sean has been sitting there waiting for that snow leopard to show up. Hours? Days?

I bet sitting in a corner staring at an empty cliff is pretty boring.

I bet the average person will get the urge to pull out their phones and start scrolling.

But if you do that you’ll miss the snow leopard

Boredom is the gate keeper for certain kinds of profound experiences. And only those who have the ability to work through boredom get to experience them.

And I’m afraid that as a society, we are slowly losing touch with that ability

So where does that leave us

Well we can lament the degradation of societies. There are enough videos about that on this platform, so for me to keep doing that would be ironically boring.

I’ll try a different angle, because we can also perceive this as an opportunity

You see modernity is strange in that most of us suffer from problems of abundance rather than scarcity

We have more foods than ever before yet we struggle to be healthy.

Most of us are more likely to die from eating too much than not eating enough.

In the same way we have more entertainment than ever before.

We can pick up our phones and instant receive more dopaminergic stimulation than even the luckiest of our ancestors.

Yet we feel empty, and struggle to find meaning.

I think some of our problems can’t be solved by getting more stuff

We evolved from primal environments of scarcity, where this instinct to get more stuff is coded into our biology through evolution. But that instinct is ill-fitted for the modern environments

In modernity, it’s our ability to resist getting stuff that constitutes the competitive advantage

To have the option to eat another serving of highly palatable foods but choose not to

To have the option to scroll on your phone but choose not to

And instead sit with yourself in the absence of external stimulation, in state of boredom, and despite the discomfort, stay there long enough until you see the snow leopards.

That’s the ability that sets you apart in this morbidly abundant environment that we call modern society

The ability to delay gratification in a world of infinite instant gratification is what increases the probability of success and fulfillment

And those of us who trains for it, will probably have a better time navigating modernity than those who don’t

So, good luck!