The last couple decades have really accelerated though, because the tendrils of capital leaching into everything and sucking people's attention spans out of their fucking skulls so now children and adults alike can't sit still and listen to anything for more than 10 minutes at a time.

I work with and manage teams of people and have for many years. It was never this bad. This isn't localized to young people and the schooling situation, this is widespread across all layers of modern society. I have professionals I deal with who have the work skills and attention spans of teenagers with their first job, and this is just common now.

Of course people are tuned out and not paying attention to politics and policy, we can't get people broadly to tune into the things that actually impact their immediate surroundings and life unless it's a 3-minute vertical clip with subway surfers playing on the bottom half and a streamer reacting in the corner.