The Antidote Was Already in the Living Room

Every night around 8pm, our family does something that apparently makes us weird. We sit down together, one TV, no phones, and we watch a Chinese drama. In Chinese.

Right now we're deep into Legend of the Condor Heroes (射鵰英雄傳), one of Jin Yong's epic wuxia stories. Forty-something episodes, each about 45 minutes long. Swordfights, betrayals, codes of honour, ancient philosophies dressed up as martial arts. My son can now tell you the difference between the Beggar Sect and the Quanzhen School. He knows why Guo Jing's loyalty matters and what it costs him. He's nine.

I didn't plan this as some kind of parenting strategy. We started watching because I love these stories and wanted to share them. I taught Japanese for years, I'm across East Asian languages and culture, and Jin Yong's novels are some of the greatest storytelling in any tradition. But what's happened since we started has been striking. And a recent conversation between Jonathan Haidt and Dr Aditi Nerurkar on The Diary of a CEO helped me understand why.

Walk into most homes at 8pm and you'll see something familiar. Mum on Instagram. Dad half-watching something on the laptop. Kids on separate devices, headphones in, each in their own algorithmic bubble. Nobody's really together. Everyone's in the same room but completely alone.

I know this because we used to be that family too.

What changed wasn't some grand intervention. It was just choosing one screen instead of four, one story instead of an infinite scroll, and making it something worth talking about.

Here's what the research is now saying, and it's worse than most people think.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 71 studies found that heavy short-form video use is associated with reduced thinking ability, shorter attention spans, and weaker impulse control. This isn't speculative anymore. The data is rolling in.

Dr Nerurkar explains the mechanism plainly: through neuroplasticity, engaging with high-volume, low-quality, quick videos actively rewires your brain. Your amygdala (the part responsible for survival and self-preservation) gets chronically overactivated. Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex (which governs impulse control, memory, planning, and complex problem-solving) gets quieter. The more you scroll, the worse the imbalance gets.

Haidt puts it even more bluntly: "Without the ability to pay attention for several minutes at a time, you're not going to be of much use as an employee, a spouse, or successful in life."

What struck me hardest was his distinction between television and touchscreens. A TV show, he argues, creates what psychologists call "transportation." You get pulled into a story. You root for the characters. Your brain builds social and emotional patterns from the narrative. But it can't happen in ten seconds. "It takes a long period of time," Haidt says. "There is no reinforcement from TV. But touchscreens are Skinner boxes." Stimulus, response, swipe, reward. Variable ratio reinforcement, the same schedule BF Skinner used to train pigeons. That's what's happening every time a kid picks up a phone.

And here's the part that keeps me up at night: kids who grow up this way lose the connection between hard work and reward. They're trained to expect instant gratification from a swipe. Why would you spend an hour on something difficult when dopamine is one thumb-flick away?

This is exactly why Jin Yong works so well for us.

These are not quick stories. Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, The Smiling Proud Wanderer, Return of the Condor Heroes: they're 40 to 60 episodes each. The plots are layered. Characters develop over dozens of hours. The moral questions are genuinely complex. Is revenge justified? What does loyalty actually mean when the person you're loyal to is wrong? How do you hold onto your principles when the world punishes you for them?

You can't half-watch this stuff. You can't scroll through it on a second screen. If you look away for five minutes, you've missed a betrayal that changes the entire story. It demands your full attention, and it rewards you for giving it.

We watch in Chinese, which adds another layer. My son is picking up vocabulary, tonal patterns, cultural references that you simply cannot get from a textbook. But the real value isn't linguistic. It's that we watch together and we talk. After an episode, we'll argue about whether a character made the right choice. We'll talk about Confucian loyalty versus Taoist freedom. We'll wonder what we would have done.

This is what Haidt describes as healthy: long-form storytelling that's social, that involves discussion, that creates genuine transportation into narrative. It's everything short-form video cannot be. Dan Martell made a point recently that stuck with me: "Business isn't B2B. It's H2H, human to human." Family is the same. No algorithm can replicate what happens when a parent and child sit together and argue about whether a character made the right choice. That's H2H. That's the thing that can't be automated or optimised away.

The effects on our family have been quiet but real.

My son's ability to follow complex narratives has grown enormously. He makes connections between characters and events that span dozens of episodes. He asks questions that show genuine critical thinking (not just "what happened" but "why did they do that" and "was that fair"). His attention span for other things (reading, building, conversation) has noticeably improved.

But the biggest change is harder to measure. We have a shared world now. Inside jokes, favourite characters, running debates. The kind of thing families used to build around the dinner table or on long road trips. Dr Nerurkar made an observation that stuck with me: there's a reason your best ideas come in the shower. It's the only place in the whole day where you're not with your device. Our evening ritual has become something similar. A daily pocket of time where we're fully present, fully together, fully engaged in something that isn't trying to sell us anything or train our reward pathways.

Meanwhile, the platforms are moving in the opposite direction. There's been a 190% increase in short-form drama apps (services that take a two-hour film and chop it into 60 bite-sized parts). Disney+ is introducing AI-generated 30-second videos. Netflix is testing short-form content on phones. As Haidt notes, every major platform's number one strategic priority is short-form video.

They're not doing this because it's good for us. They're doing it because it's retentive. Because fragmented attention is profitable.

Studios are reportedly asking screenwriters to reiterate plot points because audiences are scrolling on a second screen while watching. Think about that for a moment. We've degraded our collective attention so badly that storytellers have to assume nobody's actually paying attention.

Haidt points out that millennials may be the last broadly mentally healthy generation. Gen Z got smartphones and Instagram and front-facing cameras right as they hit puberty (around 2012 to 2015). The data on what happened next is devastating, and it started showing up in declining test scores, rising anxiety, and collapsing attention spans before COVID made everything worse.

I'm not suggesting every family needs to start watching Chinese martial arts dramas. Though honestly, you could do a lot worse.

What I am suggesting is this: find a long story and watch it together. Something with enough complexity to be worth discussing. Something that demands sustained attention and rewards it. It could be a great BBC series. A Korean drama. An epic film trilogy watched one per week. Whatever fits your family. The ingredients matter more than the genre: long-form, shared, screen-singular, conversation-worthy.

Turn off the other devices. Not because screens are inherently evil, but because the research is now clear that the constant fragmentation of attention through short-form, algorithm-driven content is doing measurable damage to our brains, our relationships, and especially our kids.

Ninety-one per cent of adults in one study showed improvement in attention, wellbeing, and mental health after just two weeks of using their devices without internet access. Two weeks. That's how quickly the brain can start recovering when you remove the Skinner box.

You don't have to go off-grid. You just have to choose what you give your attention to, and who you give it with.

Tonight we'll pick up where we left off. Episode 34, I think. Guo Jing is in trouble again. My son will have theories about what happens next. We'll argue about it. Nobody will check their phone.

It's not a hack. It's not a strategy. It's just a family, watching a story together, the way people have always done it.

Turns out, that's the antidote.