“Have you seen the Sydney Sweeney ad?”
That was the caption of a post on X featuring President Donald Trump on the roof of the White House, shouting down to onlookers about a now infamous American Eagle marketing campaign.
It’s only the latest in an endless parade of very stupid events, most of which are barely worth the time it would take to recap. To boil this story down to the essential points threatens to dissolve the whole affair, but the long and short of it is that Sydney Sweeney posed in an American Eagle jeans ad with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” The campaign launched a small culture war flare-up between those who saw something insidious in proclaiming that a pretty blonde, white girl has “great genes” and those who thought such criticisms were “woke.”
“We live in the stupidest possible timeline,” goes a familiar online refrain, posted when seemingly insignificant controversies capture Americans’ fragile attention. I’m sympathetic to the temptation. But there are two problems with the argument. First, this is the only timeline we’ve got. Second, writing our entire era off as “stupid” is a matter of perspective.
Yes, the “discourse” on any given day is often very stupid. This is an algorithmic certainty. Nearly every social media site you log onto will, almost inevitably, pull you toward some digital jangling keys—exploiting the weak spots in your attention span for clicks and follows. And yes, our current administration pushes out a near-constant stream of unfiltered nonsense that, intentionally or not, distracts us from its more serious, life-or-death offenses. And yes, there is a sort of glorification of ignorance happening in our culture, where expertise is treated with suspicion and widely debunked views on climate science, vaccines, and economic policy are elevated.
But the existence of these things doesn’t mean we live in an unusually stupid time. It is our focus—yours and mine—on stupid things that creates the sense of eroding national intelligence. An old billboard campaign reminded drivers that “You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.” We can apply the same logic to our era of social media-fueled distractions. Your timeline is only as stupid as you allow it to be. As Chris Hayes writes in The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource: “Without concerted effort, habit, and training, what we are drawn to focus on and what we believe to be important and worthy bear no intrinsic relation to each other.”
Surely you feel it. The fact that it’s harder to focus on a book than it used to be. The fact that you can’t sit quietly alone for five minutes without wondering what’s happening on your phone. We all feel caught in the pull of this stupidity, helpless before tech billionaires whose grand promises of future utopias are undercut by the reality that every invention seems to make us more anxious, more cruel, and more stupid.
But we are not algorithms. Though it can be hard to remember in the heat of any given internet moment, our attention is a force we can control. True, we may be out of practice, and our attention spans—like any muscle—may need exercise to get back into shape. But we should start working on it, because right now, many of us are needed in fights for democracy, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ+ protections. We won’t be much use in these vital struggles if we keep getting sucked into absurd culture wars. As Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy: “It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”
READ MORE: Molly McCully Has Faith That Attention Will Save Us
Which takes us back to the American Eagle situation and the jeans/genes that launched a thousand tweets, kicking off the latest chapter in a long and infuriating narrative about our culture’s inability to be normal about Sweeney. The quip about genetics and a pretty, white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired woman tripped a few cultural landmines, and a very small but very loud group of internet commenters took American Eagle to task for what they saw as a wink to white ethnocentrists in the mall fashion crowd. To be fair, a few white ethnocentrists also saw it as a wink.
In a government as reactionary as ours, it was inevitable that the incurably online right would treat this outrage as a call to arms. “Sidney Sweeney [sic], a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there!” Trump posted on Truth Social—the opening volley of an intermittently all-caps tirade referencing Bud Light, Jaguar, Taylor Swift, and the Super Bowl. The post led to others in Trump’s orbit, including Secretary of State Pete Hegseth and Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., to post pictures of themselves in jeans, boasting about their own denim.
My theory is that Trump is rarely deliberately trying to distract people. More often, he himself is distracted. In that sense, he isn’t a true driver of our “stupidest timeline,” but rather its most extreme case. And while your attention span may not be as flighty as his, you can probably sense some room for growth.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but serious political movements don’t have time to get worked up over alleged secret dog whistles buried in American Eagle ads. More focused attention could lead to better fights—and better fights could lead to real wins.
Paul encouraged the Philippians to think about “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). When I was younger, I often heard that verse used to police violent or scary movies. But now I see it as an exhortation away from stupidity—a map for ordering our attention. I see this sort of discipline in groups like Christians for a Free Palestine, who have remained dogged in their focus on the liberation of the Palestinian people. This commitment to solidarity seems like real, radical obedience to the call to think about things that are true, honorable, and right, but even sustained, social media-free time in communion with God and others would be a step in the right direction.
Paul’s command is, like many biblical commands, neither easy nor necessarily natural. But while we can’t change the timeline we’re in, we can, with effort and divine help, make it a little less stupid.
An old billboard campaign reminded drivers that “You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.” We can apply the same logic to our era of social media-fueled distractions.
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