Today’s teens are not growing up in the world we grew up in.
Their environment is designed for distraction, overstimulation, and comparison.

• Constant notifications

• Endless scrolling

• Infinite entertainment

• Digital pressure

• Hyper-curated lives of others

• Dopamine on demand

• And the illusion of “missing out” if they look away

Every app, every platform, every algorithm has one goal:

Capture their attention → Keep their attention → Monetize their attention.

This means most teens are living in “reaction mode”; jumping from one stimulus to another without ever building the ability to sit, think, or stay with a thought long enough to make a real decision. This is not laziness.
This is not lack of ambition. This is not “kids these days.”

This is the environment.

The battlefield is different. Their brains are under constant attack. And nobody is teaching them how to defend themselves.

Cinema has always been a mirror to human behavior, and it shows us what happens when a character’s attention fractures. Geeta Phogat’s performance on the mat is not just a story of strength, technique, or physical endurance. It is a story of where her attention goes.

In several key moments of the film, we see her distracted, caught between competing pressures:

• The discipline her father and coach instilled in her, demanding focus, repetition, and resilience.

• The distractions of fear, self-doubt, and the overwhelming weight of expectations from family, society, and herself.

• The emotional turbulence of adolescence; friendship, rivalry, and personal identity: all competing for her mental bandwidth.

During matches, these competing attentional forces manifest subtly: a misread opponent move, a hesitation before a crucial hold, a fleeting loss of timing. Her decline isn’t because she lacks skill: she knows every wrestling technique, has trained for years, and her body is capable; it’s because her attention is fractured. Her mind is not fully in the moment. She is physically present, but mentally scattered. And that is enough to tilt outcomes, even for someone supremely talented.

Success is not just about knowing how to do something, or having the skills, or even working hard. It is about where your attention is. The best technique fails when your mind is divided. Just as Geeta’s decline is attentional rather than physical, a teen’s poor decision whether in money, academics, or relationships: is rarely a lack of intelligence. It is a lack of focused presence.

In the chaos of their overstimulated lives, even the most talented, capable teens are vulnerable to “attention debt.” They can have all the tools, all the knowledge, all the ambition and still stumble, because their focus is constantly being pulled in ten directions at once.

Geeta’s story is not just about wrestling. It is a cinematic mirror showing us that attention is the real game-changer. Master it, and performance soars. Lose it, and even the strongest skills can falter.

For teens, this could mean turning off devices during homework, dedicating specific hours to learning, or even just pausing before responding to a message to regain control of their mind. Focus is a muscle: the more consistently it’s exercised, the stronger it becomes  and in today’s overstimulated world, a focused mind is the ultimate currency. While playing be focussed on the game, while eating be focussed on eating, while bathing be focussed on your body. While studying be completely engrossed in it. Anything that tries to steal your attention, say goodbye to it and that's how you build that muscle. Initially it might be difficult but once you get a hang of it. It starts becoming easier, and your results start speaking from themselves.