Books/Stolen Focus
Subtitle: Why you can't pay attention -- and How to think deeply again
Author: Johann Hari
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. 🤦
I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.
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 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 deprivation:
- The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering
- The Crippling of Our Flow States
- The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion
- The Collapse of Sustained Reading
- The Disruption of Mind-Wandering
- The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You
- The Surge in Stress and How It Is Triggering Vigilance
- Our Deteriorating Diets
- Rising Pollution
- The Rise of ADHD and How We Are Responding to It
- The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically
Digital detox phase
The author starts his journey with a digital detox, by going completely offline. It is worth mentioning at this point that the author is/was a journalist. He gets a laptop that can't go online, an iPod loaded with songs, a feature phone and a watch. He is like Ulysses tying himself to the ship's mast to avoid the sirens. He moves to a tiny town called Provincetown near Boston for a month. At this stage, the author still believes that this is an individual problem that he can find an individual solution for.
Though the author brought some books with him, he needs to chill a little bit before he can get any reading done, because his attention needs some time to recover from all the wreckage inflicted on it by Twitter and breaking news.
Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego—it loves you, it hates you, it’s talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It’s never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.
The amount of information that the average person is exposed to is going up. It's like the equivalent of 174 newspapers now. Even the author, a journalist, found himself reading only about 3 newspapers a day when in Provincetown. We are sacrificing depth in this process. We are also constantly bombarded with easy distractions instead of focusing on the difficult things that are actually worth doing.
Everything's getting faster, not just the technology. We are literally walking 10% faster than before, at least in cities. We also learned the myth of multi-tasking —juggling too many tasks— with our single-minded brains from our exposure to computers which made our attention worse. Deliberately slowing down using practices like yoga or meditation, seems to improve our attention span. Multi-tasking drops your IQ level by 10 points. Being stoned is better than this because it only drops your IQ by half of that. Modern knowledge workers aren't getting a single hour of uninterrupted time per day.
Getting rid of distractions and mono-tasking seems to be the way forward, but how much individual control do we have over this systemic problem? Do we all convince our governments to pass a law like France did, to not disturb workers after they go home?
We can't just monotask by force of will. We are all distracted by noisy open-plan offices and classrooms, crowded cities and an unhealthy addiction to sugar and stimulants.
Relapse phase
Half-way through the digital detox program, the author starts missing his digital devices and their distractions. Instead of reading, he finds himself skimming through books like they're articles on the web. He realized that people around him are broadcasting themselves to each other instead of having a conversation. He wondered if social media increased narcissism in people. He then finds himself struggling to focus on reading his books.
if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions.
Reinforcements vs Flow
To get himself out of his misery, the author decides to interview Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow. He was one of the early psychologists who focused on positive psychology instead of the focus on psychiatric disorders or manipulating people. B.F. Skinner, the most prominent psychologist of that time, popularized the concept of effecting habit change through reinforcement which helped sociopathic Silicon Valley founders decades later to create addictive, attention-wrecking apps. Mihaly first discovered flow in his study of artists and then correlated it to his own childhood experiences. He found that people find that the process is reward itself, not the end result. True happiness is in the flow state.
There are three things to do to get into flow:
- Choose a clearly defined goal
- The task should be meaningful to you
- The task that you do should be at the edge of your abilities
Tasks that produce flow inherently require mono-tasking. They should be meaningful and test our abilities. Mihaly's brother Moricz was a self-taught geologist who could stare at a crystal for ten hours in his flow state.
“To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it,” Mihaly explained. “We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?”
The way out of distraction is to find flow. In a flow state we forget ourselves, we lose track of time and have a sense of doing something bigger than ourselves. Removing our distractions is not enough. The purpose should be flow. The author started writing his novel to fill his undistracted time with a meaningful pursuit and to experience flow states.
When you are approaching death, I thought, you won’t think about your reinforcements—the likes and retweets—you’ll think about your moments of flow.
We can either fragment our attention over trivial re-inforcing rewards or experience flow states. The former seems to be our society's default now. The latter is intentional and highly rewarding.
