Smartphones have ruined a lot of attention spans — mine included.

Even with no other proof, I could measure its attenuation by the number of books I read in a year. For the better part of my adult life, being a reader was a part of my identity, of who I thought I was.

If I’m giving an honest account, the number of books I read in a year has dwindled to a few. Sure, some of them are longer sci-fi novels, and weather and streaming shows may also hamper me, but the truth is I have plenty of time for scrolling endlessly on Instagram, my social media drug of choice.

I don’t generally reread books, but I’ve gone back to the Kurt Vonnegut book I’ve long claimed as my favorite of his, “Slapstick,” because I’m trying to rekindle whatever it was that made me fall in love with it when I was 20, to see if it can capture my attention like it did then.

I get through a few pages at a time, and it’s delightfully written. But it’s not like I can’t wait to pick it up, and when I do, well, my phone had better be out of reach if I’m to get through more than a few pages.

More evidence of my flagging attention span is in the number of movies I see per year. I once loved going to dumb movies and smart films alike. Somewhere, I still have the tall stack of movie ticket stubs I accumulated in my teens and 20s. Of course, as you get older, you don’t want to “waste” time sitting and watching bad films.

But you can’t determine a film’s excellence by scrolling on your phone and reading comments by people you don’t know or respect about things you often don’t really care about.

And it’s not just my attention span that I miss. I miss other people’s, too.

It’s not just that they’ll get on their phones and start scrolling when we’re riding in a car or having lunch together, although that certainly happens to all of us. I’m talking about something much more specific: I’ll be starting to say something, thinking we are having a conversation, and suddenly some distraction — a conversation nearby, or at the skatepark, someone doing literally anything behind me, be it a trick or taking a fall — will whisk away with their attention.

That’s fine. I have been known to do this, too, as my family will readily attest. Rightly so. Depending on the topic, my mind can and does wander.

Because my lack of engaged listening and occasional inability to stay on topic have been pointed out to me a few million times, it’s pretty easy to see and forgive when others do it, because that’s distraction, not evidence of a missing attention span.

No, the missing attention span becomes detectable when they fail to say something like, “Sorry, you stupid bore, what were you saying?”

That’s a joke, but there is always the risk that it’s not the listener — it’s the boring story or the person who’s chattering, i.e., me. Then again, I’m not exactly giving lectures. I’m talking about two people having a chat when one of them is knocked out of it by the least interruption.

Emotionally, when it happens, I feel hurt, invisible, ignored. If I had the presence of mind, I’d shout, “Hey, you! The person I’m talking to! Remember how I was just telling you a story, but then you saw so and so talking to whoever and decided to listen to them instead?” Then I’d give them a little smack in the forehead if at all possible while saying it.

Instead, I usually keep barreling forward with whatever dumb point or story I’m trying to convey in an effort to be heard, to feel visible again.

A few weeks ago, I finally made good on my pledge to stop talking the next time the person I was talking to became distracted and didn’t return to the topic. It actually felt liberating, or at least less frustrating, to confirm they really weren’t listening.

As victories go, though, it was a hollow one. Because I don’t know what it means for people if we treat the ones we know in real life the same way we do strangers on social media — by trying to scroll on to the next thing.