New Year's Eve turned out okay in the end because I took up a resolution early: long drinks are a waste of space. I'll have a shot instead.

This is also the way to consume culture. Life is short. Get a good editor.

Ten days cooped up with the family over Christmas may give me a mental aneurysm but it has always had the reliable bonus of boosting the number of books I’ve read that year by at least double. This year, however, I managed only one.

And it wasn’t because I was too busy telling my family how much I love them; it was because that book was 800 pages long (and I was catching up on Breaking Bad). Thank you, Donna Tartt, for destroying my Christmas book quota like that. And The Goldfinch was no Secret History; where’s the bloody incest?

The reading was also interspersed with watching Pharrell’s video, Happy, which clocks in at 24 hours long. And when my family decided we needed some perspective on our mutual imprisonment, we took a group trip to see Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom. That took 141 minutes out of our day (not including trailers).

Books, films and all the other distractions we use to give life a point are getting pointlessly long. Since Hilary Mantel, women authors have realised the fastest way to enter the modern canon is to write a book only a man could carry.  Would people have liked the Booker Prize winner The Luminaries quite so much had it been half the length? The accolades it garnered were really readers congratulating themselves for skimming that final page. While the greatest beneficiary of the current vogue for bicep-straining tomes is the sales team at Kindle. 

When it comes to length, you can't help but feel sorry for filmmakers. They have to squeeze the life of some statesman or gangster (the biopic of Ronnie Biggs must be mulling somewhere) into a two hour sprint while competing with the slow burn character development of The Wire, House of Cards or - and here's guessing but I'm so excited - the mini series starting Sunday with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey (the most underrated actor of his generation whose name I still can't pronounce). 

While these types of series are relatively young (happy ten year anniversary, Buffy) they hark back to a tried-and-tested method of plot development: a self-contained episode, usually ending with some kind of cliffhanger, which fits into a broader narrative arch. Well hello, Dickens! Or Thackeray! Or Wilkie C!

So people might moan about the impact of Twitter and Vine and blogs on our memory but great storytellers have always known that we have the attention span of gnats. And have had respect for their audience's time.