Books/Stolen Focus
Subtitle: Why you can't pay attention -- and How to think deeply again
Author: Johann Hari
I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.
How I found this book
I have personally come to the realization that my most scarce resource is not time, but attention. All of the time management books I could get my hands on weren't helping with the attention crisis we are all going through. Books on habit-forming like Atomic Habits are getting popular, but they shift the blame for the attention crisis to the individual, much like the carbon footprint narrative. Since I was subsconsciously on the search for a fix for my attention problem, I was quickly attracted to this book. I discovered this book because of the author's appearance on the Upstream podcast.
Summary
The author has interviewed 250 experts over the course of writing this book. I will mention the names of only a few of them in this summary. Also, some experts disagree with each other.
The Attention Crisis
In the introduction, the author addresses the attention crisis facing everybody in our time. He has a personal anecdote about a trip he makes with his godson from the UK to the US to go to Graceland (related to the popstar Elvis Presley). Ten years pass between the time the author makes his promise and they actually make the trip. Graceland itself has changed meanwhile, with digital technology taking over the very experience. People go through the trip using an iPad app. The author is annoyed to find that people are more obsessed with the digital toy than with experiencing Elvis's house. Meanwhile, his godson can't get over his addiction to the four apps he keeps switching between.
The author starts interviewing leading authorities on various attention-related things over the course of a few years (about 250 experts in total). Much like climate scientists, he starts discovering that the attention crisis is getting worse over time and its worst effects were in the past few decades.
Roy Baumeister -- the author of Will Power -- remarked that his own attention is not as good as it used to be. He plays Candy Crush Saga on his phone before going to bed. 🤦
The attention crisis is similar to the obesity crisis. It isn't a personal failing but a social epidemic. This is a systemic problem. Big Tech carries some of the blame for it, but not entirely. The author identifies 12 systemic causes for our attention deprication and devotes a chapter each to exploring them.
There are three reasons why we need to focus on attention:
- A life full of distractions is a diminished life. We can't achieve much.
- The attention crisis is a crisis for the whole society. We can't solve problems.
- If we understand what's going on, we can begin work on undoing this human-made crisis.
The author starts his journey with a digital detox. At this stage he still believes that this is an individual problem that he can find an individual solution for.
