Johann Hari

Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding it much harder to focus than he used to. He found that a life of constantly switching from device to device, from tab to tab, is diminishing and depressing. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but in the long-term, nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings--and learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. In the U.S., teenagers now focus on a task for only sixty-five seconds on average, and office workers manage only three minutes. We think this inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: Our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces, and the science shows that these forces have been ramping up for decades--leaving us uniquely vulnerable, when social media arrived, to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. These forces have been so successful that our collapse in attention is behind many of the wider problems society faces. In Stolen Focus, Hari embarks on a thrilling journey, taking readers from veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD, to Silicon Valley dissidents who exposed social media companies' furtive attempts to hack our focus; from a favela in Rio where everyone lost their attention in a particularly catastrophic way, to an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore their workers' attention. In this urgent, deeply researched book, Hari shows that if we understand the twelve true causes of this crisis, we can finally begin to solve it--as individuals, and as a society--by staging an attention rebellion. Finally, we have a way to get our focus back.

Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again

Stolen Focus

Soham Dasgupta

This is being done to us all. It is being done by very powerful forces. Those forces include Big Tech, but they also go way beyond them. This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.

Once I knew this, I understood why, when I felt constantly distracted, I didn’t just feel irritated—I felt diminished. We know, at some level, that when we are not focusing, we are not using one of our greatest capacities. Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere what we might have been.

We internalize the texture of the voices we’re exposed to.

whenever I would see somebody just sit there for six hours, doing nothing but stare out of the window, I would feel an urge to lean over to them and say, “I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s none of my business, but I just wanted to check—you do realize that you have a limited amount of time in which to be alive, and the clock counting down toward death is constantly ticking, and you’ll never get back these six hours you are spending doing nothing at all? And when you are dead, you’ll be dead forever? You know that, right?”

There’s no button that says “I want to meet up—who’s nearby and free?” This isn’t technologically tricky.

After you’ve adjusted your perspective in this way, seeing this as a debate between whether you are pro-tech or anti-tech is bogus and lets the people who stole your attention off the hook. The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?

Children’s lives have come to be dominated by ideas “that are very radical and new. The idea that kids can’t play outside without this being dangerous—that has never been the case in human history...” It’s an inversion of what every previous human society has thought.

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